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22-23 May 2025 Amiens & Rouen (France)
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Call for PapersFrom the earliest days of contact between Europe and the Indigenous Americas, a vision emerged that was to flourish in the 18th century – in the writings of Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire – contrasting the “good savage” with the “bad savage”. For Christopher Columbus, the Lucayes of Guanahani, then the Taíno of Hispaniola, possessed the Adamic traits of the good savage: naked, welcoming, peaceful and adherents of a primitive monotheism. Opposed to them, their traditional enemies, the “Cannibals” or Carib of the Lesser Antilles immediately became the symbol of barbarism: faithless, lawless, kingless, long before any actual encounter. With the European colonization of the “cannibal islands” in the early 17th century, accounts of these Indigenous peoples, now known as “Kalínago”, began to proliferate in the form of travel reports, missionary relations, administrative correspondence, tales and dictionaries. For almost three and a half centuries, these colonial sources, mostly in French, served as the basis for a history of the Indigenous peoples, according to which an initial settlement known as “Arawak” took place, followed by a Carib invasion whose traces the first archaeologists in the West Indies tried – in vain – to find (Delawarde 1937; Pinchon 1952). But in the early 1980s, research in the Caribbean began a methodological and historiographical shift. Although not quite on a par with the effervescence that shook Amazonian studies at the same time, new methods of archaeological investigation and a renewed reading of colonial sources, combined with a contemporary anthropological perspective, profoundly altered our vision of the Indigenous history of the Caribbean. It is essential to think critically about the nature and quality of historical sources (Hulme 1986; Hulme and Whitehead 1992; Whitehead 1995; Grunberg 2011). These narrative forms, produced exclusively by scholars of European origin, describe populations with a strictly oral tradition, from the outside and through the prism of a distorting ethnocentrism. They all betray, in a more or less pronounced manner, their authors’ inability to understand the cultural and socio-political dynamics at work in the Indigenous Caribbean. Indigenous populations are often reduced to a spoken language (Carib vs.Arawak), a shared culture (Kalínago / Island Carib vs. Arawak / Lokono), and the relationships between these groups to an ontological antagonism. And what of the abundant ethnonymic indeterminacy that reigns in these stories? Does it not testify to Europeans’ lack of understanding of Indigenous ways of asserting identity? (Roux 2019). Yet, linguistic and archaeological evidence shows that these populations were more like chains of societies, aggregating or splitting up local communities according to vast, organized networks of exchange - matrimonial, commercial, warlike, etc. – from the banks of the Orinoco and Amazon rivers to the West Indies (Dreyfus 1992; Whitehead 1993). The Kalínago language is thus descended from the Arawak language family (Taylor 1977; Hoff 1994; but see also Bakker 2019 and Jansen 2020 on genderlect, a term that attempts to define the variations observed in the linguistic practices of Kalínago men and women). Similarly, the filiation established between the Koriabo (Guyanas) and Cayo (Lesser Antilles) ceramic complexes allows us to appreciate the cultural contact, on the one hand, between island natives and, on the other, between islanders and mainland groups, as well as the complexity of Indigenous societies, the continuity of practices, and the entanglement of populations (Boomert 1986; Rostain 1994; Hofman et al. 2014). At the turn of the 16th century, however, the modes of control and domination exercised by the colonial empires did not augur well for cultural continuity or the survival of these groups: o<ing to microbial shock, forced labor, wars, and exiles and forced displacements (Gonzalez 1988; Fabel 2000) in the case of the Garifuna / Garinagu, peoples said to be the product of mixed marriages between Africans and the Indigenous. Ethnic boundaries between Indigenous groups, hitherto mobile and tenuous, were strengthened by colonial pressure and clarified the identity of populations in more recent history. Although difficult to pin down today, their fluctuations, like their forced or induced restructurings (migratory, social, identity-based, economic, etc.) brought about by the political, demographic and cultural upheavals of the European conquest, are as significant as they are uneven, depending on place and time. In addition, the introduction of African populations displaced to the West Indies as part of the slave trade led to new practices within the groups, such as the flattening of the infant’s forehead among the Garifuna / Garinagu. At the very least, this example testifies to these people’s desire to define and negotiate their identity not in biological terms, but in cultural terms. The sharing of rites and spiritual practices, as well as other mores and customs, also suggests that biological lineage was not the only means of defining group membership. But filiation, even biological filiation, can be perceived as absent. Among the Carib of Saint Vincent, there is a sense of a missing link due to the disruptions caused by the exile of members of the group, who subsequently reconstructed their identity in Central America (Leland 2014; Prescod 2017). The erasure of language and a substantial part of cultural practices is coupled with a lack of willingness to foster the transmission and cultivation of the historical memory of the groups’ trajectory. The studies presented at this colloquium will focus on the (non-)transmission of the history and heritage of Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, and on cultural entanglements. They will seek to define the networks woven by Indigenous groups that have given rise to resistance to domination and acculturation, but also to cultural contacts and inter-ethnic and inter-territorial exchanges. They will also examine the ways in which the intangible heritage of Indigenous peoples is claimed, perceived and interpreted today. References
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