The Making of Caribbeanist

Abstract

This essay is in part analytical, in part autobiographical. It mixes the two elements to describe how at least one scholar in the area of Caribbean studies came to be so. The autobiographical part describes the personal career pattern of the author, his intellectual beginnings in the South Wales of the 1930s, his wartime experience, his continuing education at Oxford and Harvard, his American experience after 1947, and his final arrival in the Caribbean for a permanent residence at the University of Puerto Rico after 1955. It identifies the challenge that coming to the Caribbean meant at that time; it also identifies how the earlier British and American experience had prepared him, or to some degree not prepared him, for the entry into a tropical Third World regional society that was—and still is—so fundamentally different to the British and the American societies in terms of history, cultural patterns, color and race. This section thus, in a way, constitutes a comparative discussion of the three societies that have shaped the author—Britain, the United States, the Caribbean—and how the lessons gained from the life experience in each one have helped towards the richer understanding of the others. The analytical part of the essay, somewhat less personal, addresses itself to the various issues and problems that naturally concern the practitioner in Caribbean studies. What are the various tools, both practical and conceptual, that the Caribbeanist should possess in order better to comprehend the complex reality of the multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious Caribbean society as a whole? What is the relationship between academic research and personal ideological belief? Is the social-science conventional wisdom of a value-free scholarship either practical or desirable? What are the consequences of the fact that since 1945 Caribbean studies have become in many ways a North American monopoly? What is the relationship between the Caribbeanist as specialist and the Caribbeanist as generalist? What is the relationship between personal research and collective research? Are Caribbean studies a modern phenomenon; or is it possible to argue—as seems plausible—that in a very real way they actually begin as early as the post-Conquest society with the emergence of Fray Ramón Pane as the first Caribbean ethnologist, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas as the first Caribbean anthropologist, Herrera and Oviedo as the first Caribbean historians? It is evident enough, at least, that Caribbean studies today, to be fruitful, must be seriously inter-disciplinary in its character.