CHAPTER IX

HYPOTHESES AND THE PROBLEM OF ‘EXPLANATION’

N the preceding chapters we have examined most of the features of Guianese society which are necessary to the type of correlation we wish to make, and this chapter outlines our main hypothesis.  We also deal briefly with the problem of ‘explanation’ as it has been conceived in relation to West Indian family life.

STATUS DIFFERENTIATION IN THE TOTAL SOCIAL SYSTEM AND THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF THE HOUSEHOLD GROUP

The crux of our argument lies in this:—

We maintain that the matri-focal system of domestic relations and household groupings, in the villages we have studied, can be regarded as the obverse of the marginal nature of the husband-father rôle.  We further argue that there is a correlation between the nature of the husband-father rôle and the rôle of men in the economic system and in the system of social stratification in the total Guianese society.  Men, in their rôle of husband-father, are placed in a position where neither their social status nor their access to, and command of economic resources are of major importance in the functioning of the household group at certain stages of its development.

Such an argument requires a good deal of elaboration and we shall begin by attempting to summarize the main features of the status system and the family system as follows:—

Features of the status system

A.    There is a scale of colour values at the extremes of which the ‘white’ or European complex is given positive value, and the ‘black’ or Negro complex is given negative value, and this serves as a basis for the hierarchical ranking of persons, and groups of persons, according to the ‘colour’ characteristics ascribed to them.

B.     The other main basis of evaluation of a person’s status is in terms of his performance in economic or occupational rôles, thereby making it possible for a limited number of persons to achieve higher status than that which is initially ascribed to them on the basis of their ‘colour’, though the ethnic component of a person’s social character is never completely effaced as a factor in status placement.  Achieved status is secondary to ascribed status, especially at the extreme ends of the colour scale, but the evaluation of performance in jobs, educational attainment, etc., can serve as a basis for upward mobility especially in the middle zone of the colour scale.

C.     We may speak of a colour/class system in so far as the internal differentiation of the social system allocates differential facilities and rewards largely on the basis of position on the scale of socially evaluated colour differences, but the fact that performance criteria are taken into account keeps the system ‘open’ to a degree where we can speak of ‘classes’ which do not have an absolute one to one relation to ethnic factors.

D.    Ethnic groups such as the Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians, which do not fit readily into the colour/class hierarchy, are able to infiltrate at all levels and to take over special functions where a relative lack of status-consciousness is an advantage, particularly in the retail and distributive trades.  The development of a separate collectivity, primarily oriented towards a function implying the predominance of economic achievement, such as business enterprise, competition and efficiency, really conflicts with ascribed membership of groups, and it would seem to have been fortuitous that these ethnic groups came from societies where there was already a tradition of trading, shopkeeping, money-lending and so on.  The market nexus of petty trading in British Guiana is interstitial to the ascriptively based social groupings but it has not developed very far towards becoming organized, or forming a primary focus of attention for the ordering of social relations, and in any case the larger scale marketing operations have been controlled by the higher status ethnic groups.  The very multiplicity of operators in the lowest level of the marketing system (especially vendors of garden produce, fruits, etc.), is an indication of the tendency to spread the functions and prevent specialization from developing to a point where it would conflict with the ascribed low status of the operators.  One special feature of a differentiated group in market operations is the necessity for ‘affective neutrality’, and this could most readily be found in the Chinese and Portuguese groups, where all other sections of the population did in fact regard them as being neutral in terms of the scale of colour values, and the symbolism connected with it (see Parsons 1952: 59–61).

E.     In the villages studied, the model of the total social system tends to repeat itself, but since the village is only a section of the total society, it does not have the same degree of internal differentiation.  The village ‘upper-class’ is either occupationally or ethnically differentiated in the sense that its members are either non-Negroes, or in high-status white-collar (usually government) jobs, and it shows its difference by means of ‘diacritical’ signs such as dress, speech pattern, marriage pattern, etc. (this term is used in the sense defined by Nadel 1951: 45–7).

F.      The main village group tends to be solidary vis-à-vis the rest of the society, and status differentiation within it is discouraged since this would conflict with the main status differentiations within the total social system.  However, there are both non-hierarchical differentiations (segmentations), and minor differential prestige positions within it, as well as the inevitable age and sex differentiations which are not directly relevant to the present discussion.

G.    There is a variation in the degree of internal differentiation as between the three villages.

Main aspects of family structure

A.    The household group tends to be matri-focal in the sense that a woman in the status of ‘mother’ is usually the de facto leader of the group, and conversely the husband-father, although de jure head of the household group (if present), is usually marginal to the complex of internal relationships of the group.  By ‘marginal’ we mean that he associates relatively infrequently with the other members of the group, and is on the fringe of the effective ties which bind the group together.  

B.     Household groups normally come into being when a man and a woman enter a conjugal union (legal or common-law marriage), and set up house together in a separate dwelling.  Either or both partners may have children which were born prior to the establishment of an effective conjugal union.

C.     During the period when the woman is bearing children she will be most dependent on her spouse for economic support and most subject to his authority and control, but as her children grow older she becomes much more independent and acquires much greater security in her status as ‘mother’.

D.    Common-law marriage is a cultural characteristic of the lower class, and can be regarded as a permissive deviation from the norms of the total social system.  The non-legal nature of the tie reflects the reluctance to establish a conclusive bond and is in accordance with the primary emphasis upon the mother-child relationship rather than the conjugal relationship.

E.     There is a variation in the incidence of different types of conjugal union as between the three villages.

These two paradigms have been constructed in an attempt to compress into a more manageable form the relevant features of the two complexes we wish to correlate, and they are only intended as a brief summary of our previous descriptions.

It would seem that whilst biological relatedness is taken as a major focus of status ascription in the total social system, the unit of kinship which is emphasized in this respect is not the nuclear or extended family as such, but rather the widest possible kinship unit which is the ethnic group itself.  Within this group two other points of reference become foci of differentiation in descending order of importance (from this point of view).  They are territorial affiliation (membership of the local community), and matri-filiation.  Matri-filiation as a basis of status ascription has a long history in the West Indies, and under the slave regime it was taken as defining legal status.  The child of a slave woman and a free man always took its mother’s legal status and became a slave (see Cousins 1935).  In the contemporary situation the relation to the mother almost invariably determines the place of residence of the child, for it is the services rendered to the child by the mother, such as ‘care’ in its broadest sense, which are amongst the main functions of the household group.  In this respect it is significant that any woman will give any child a little food, and children quite often eat at their play-mates’ homes or at the houses of kinsfolk if they happen to be there at meal times.

There is a sense in which we can take for granted the fact that the mother-child relationship will be a close one in any society, and the real problem then begins to centre on the way in which masculine rôles are integrated into the family system, and the way in which the mother-child relationship is structured to fit in with the general structure including the masculine rôle pattern (see Radcliffe-Brown 1950: 77).

In societies where kinship provides the basis for practically all the differentiation within the social system, the positions of prestige and control are almost invariably and totally vested in adult males and no matter whether the system is patrilineal, matrilineal or based on double unilinear descent, it is males in whom the principal rights over property and services are vested.  The varying patterns of domestic organization may place these rights in different contexts, and even where the rights themselves are formally vested in women, as amongst the Hopi, it is still the males who control the exercise of these rights, and who hold positions of primary managerial authority (see Eggan 1949).

It is clear from our discussions in previous chapters that the rôle of husband-father is by no means absent in lower-class Negro society in British Guiana, nor is it reduced to such insignificant proportions as we find in certain extreme matrilineal societies such as the traditional Nayar (Gough 1952) or Menangkabau (Josselin de Jong 1951).

Amongst the Nayar a woman resides in the joint household (taravad) of her matri-lineage, and is visited by a series of lovers with whom she has sexual relations.  Her children remain with her in the taravad where they come under the authority of the eldest male member of the group, who may be the woman’s brother, mother’s brother or even mother’s mother’s brother.  The child’s father, who is an outsider to the group (he may even belong to a different caste), has no economic, political or ritual functions in relation to the taravad of his children.  His relationship to his child is confined to presenting certain customary gifts at the time of the birth.  The rôle of husband-father is not completely absent from the Nayar system, but it is reduced to extremely limited proportions.

However, men do have vital economic, political, status, and ritual functions in relation to their own taravad and it is the existence of a tightly organized unilinear descent group, having strongly corporate functions, and laying stress upon the close interdependence of a set of brothers and sisters that makes the Nayar system completely different from that with which we are dealing in British Guiana.  The Nayar are able to reduce the husband-father rôle to minimal proportions precisely because male rôles in relation to the taravad are so highly developed and the supportive activities of males in relation to women and children are embodied in the structure of the taravad.  Virtually the only activities of men in relation to women which are left outside the sphere of the matri-lineage are those concerned with sexual activity and procreation.

In the bilaterally organized kinship system of the villages with which we are dealing, men are essential providers of economic support for women and children.  Women can, and do, engage in money-making activities, but they cannot be economically self-sufficient.  The question then arises as to how men’s supportive functions shall be tied in to the family system.  There are thus two distinct problems to be considered.  The first concerns the male rôle in society, and here we have indicated that men are expected to earn money to contribute to the support of women and children.  We have described in some detail the difficulties which face men in a society where there is little prospect of steady employment, and we have also stressed the fact that there is little occupational differentiation and correspondingly little hierarchical status differentiation          amongst the village men.  The second problem concerns the direction  in which men are to offer their economic support, and this is the main problem we are to consider here.  Economic support for women  and children is located in a series of statuses, the principal ones being those of son, husband and lover.  It is not located in a group for in a bilaterally organized kinship system there is no enduring kinship-group structure available.  For any particular woman with children the problem is to find a male in one of the above statuses  to provide the necessary support.  Chance factors inherent in the birth and death incidence render the likelihood of there being an individual always available to fill a given status somewhat uncertain, and therefore a situation such as the one in British Guiana has to be sufficiently fluid to permit of a choice of alternative persons.  This is particularly the case in bilateral systems of narrow range.

One way of resolving this difficulty is to vest the functions of economic support in a husband-father who is selected from a wide range of possible individuals and this is precisely what happens in our case.  However, the importance of the economic function of the husband-father becomes diminished as the woman passes her period of maximum dependence and becomes freed for economic activities of her own and as her sons begin to take over supportive functions.  The reasons for this must be sought in the economic and stratification systems of the total social system.  In a society where the range of effective kinship ties is narrowed to a point where the nuclear family becomes a highly significant and relatively isolated unit, as in urban middle-class groups in the United States, then the position of the husband-father in the primary status-determining occupational system, rather than in an extended kinship system, is a crucial one.  In such a situation hierarchical mobility is normal and the husband-father determines the social status of the whole unit by virtue of his position in the occupational system.  He becomes the peg on which the whole unit hangs.

In British Guiana the male member of the village groups neither has exclusive control over property and services, including the means of production for the livelihood of the household group, nor does he determine its status in the social system by virtue of his position in a graded occupational hierarchy, since this is already determined to a large extent by ‘race’ or ‘colour’, plus membership of the territorial unit which is the village.  The important fact is that occupations are not hierarchically graded to any significant extent within the main Negro village groups, though the occupations of the Negro men are ranked low in the total occupational system in the same way that Negro men are ranked low in the colour scale.  The male’s participation in the occupational system does not affect the status of the other members of the household group, which is already defined by their racial characteristics and territorial affiliation.  This is a very broad statement and only holds good for the relatively undifferentiated lowest status group.  As soon as one approaches the upper fringe of this group, where prestige factors begin to operate, or get into the higher-status village group, then the occupation of the husband-father becomes significant, and there is a quite definite tendency for his position in the household group to be established, and for him to become a reference point for the other members of the group.  In the urban middle-class certain other factors may intervene to tend to bring the focus of solidarity of the group back to the mother, particularly where the man marries a lighter coloured woman who then becomes a focus of attention for status placement on the colour scale (see Braithwaite 1953).  In the middle-class there is always this interplay between occupational factors, and ‘colour’ and/or ‘cultural’ factors.  In the lowest status group the only basis for male authority in the household unit is the husband-father’s contribution to the economic foundation of the group, and where there is both insecurity in jobs where males are concerned, and opportunities for women to engage in moneymaking activities, including farming, then there is likely to develop a situation where men’s rôles are structurally marginal in the complex of domestic relations Concomitantly, the status of women as mothers is enhanced and the natural importance of the mother rôle is left unimpeded.

Although we have had to present our argument rather forcefully in order to make it clear, there are certain reservations which must be entered.  The analysis of family structure has shown quite clearly that the elementary family, consisting of a conjugal pair and their offspring is not atypical in the groups we have been considering, but is in fact the normal unit of co-residence, particularly at the stage when a father-figure is important in the socialization of the children.  It is not within our competence to discuss the psychological implications of this fact but in any discussion of socialization it should be borne in mind that we are dealing with a social system where the normal unit of child-rearing is an elementary family unit.  In particular cases of mental development it would be important to look for the deviations from this norm and in discussing the psychological component of values it may be necessary to bear in mind the nature of the father-child and mother-child relationships.  In the three villages we have been discussing it would not be justifiable to treat these questions as if the normal pattern were for children to grow up without any kind of relationship to a father or father-surrogate, and high illegitimacy rates are not an indication of these relationships.

THE CULTURE-HISTORICAL APPROACH TO NEW WORLD NEGRO FAMILY ORGANIZATION

Writings on New World Negro family organization have tended to concentrate to some extent on the controversy as to whether the form of the New World Negro family is the result of the peculiar conditions obtaining on the plantations during the period of slavery or whether it can be seen as a modified survival of an ‘African’ family pattern.  Equally plausible theories supported by historical evidence have been advanced on either side, and the polemical discussions have brought to light a considerable body of information and have been productive of many profound insights.  It would seem, though, that there is a need for synchronic analysis, which attempts to understand the working of the system without any pre-conceptions as to its previous states.  There is always a danger that the prior task of sociological analysis may be side-stepped when historical factors are prematurely introduced as ‘explanatory’ devices.

Professor and Mrs. Herskovits were, in a very real sense, the pioneers of anthropological study in the Caribbean area, and their work has had a profound influence on subsequent investigators, so that it is impossible to discuss the problems of the area without considering their work.  It is beyond the scope of this book to offer a critical examination of the highly developed theoretical approach they brought to their studies, and we shall confine our discussion to the interpretations they present of some of the institutions of West Indian society.  More particularly we shall consider those interpretations concerning the village of Toco in Trinidad which most nearly resembles August Town, Perseverance and Better Hope (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947).

The Herskovitses are primarily concerned with the problem of law in history, or the processes of social change, and they suggest that two different drives work together to fashion civilization.

There are first of all the forces that, without reference to cultural form as such, are constantly at work to maintain the balance between stability and change in every culture or, where different cultures are in close and continuous contact, to accelerate change.  Then there are the unique historical sequences of events which, in any given instance, determine particular reactions in specific situations, and through this the particular forms that the institutions, beliefs, and values in a given culture will take at a given moment in its history (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947: 5–6).

In discussing Toco, they state explicitly that it will be necessary to comprehend both the general laws of cultural dynamics, and the particular historical forces bringing about change in Toco.  These ‘general laws of social dynamics’ are relatively simple and are set out at length by Professor Herskovits in other publications.  Principally they concern the idea of ‘cultural focus’, ‘cultural retention’, and ‘reinterpretation’ of ‘borrowed’ items of culture (M.J. Herskovits 1945).  Fundamental to the whole theory is the assertion that culture is learned, and culture is an all-embracing concept of which social organization is one ‘aspect’ (M.J. Herskovits 1952).  They demonstrate quite convincingly in the opening section of ‘Trinidad Village’ that one way of explaining the importance of women in the family structure of Toco, is to see this structure as a persistence of a part of the form of African family organization.  In Africa each wife has her own hut which she inhabits with her children, and whilst those aspects of African social organization which were the field of male activity (the clan, and the extended family) were impossible to maintain under slavery conditions this basic structure of a woman and her children persisted through all the vicissitudes of slavery.  The rôle of the father continued to be remote from the children and the wife as it was in Africa.  Unfortunately there is an equally convincing ‘explanation’ of how this situation involving the importance of women in the family system might have arisen.  Franklin Frazier has carefully documented the disruption in family life brought about by slavery and demonstrated how the natural unit of a woman and her children was the one most likely to survive, no matter what the antecedent form of family life might have been (Frazier 1939).  It would seem difficult to make a choice between these two alternative ‘explanations’ and Henriques in a paper published in 1949, sought a compromise by giving each ‘explanation’ some credence (Henriques 1949).  In his later work however he seems to have concentrated much more upon showing the relation between family structure and the differential factors of social status in terms of the colour/class system which originated in the slave society (Henriques 1953).

The main body of the book on Toco is concerned with descriptions of Toco life, and perhaps the most unsatisfying sections from our point of view are those on mating and the family.  The distribution figures which are given must be considered of doubtful validity since they are not based on any sampling system.  Figures on marital status are ‘of a considerable proportion of the families in Toco and its immediate vicinity’ whilst the number of children in 106 households was computed by asking persons to give the number of children in the households of their neighbours and friends (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947: 105–6).  In a preliminary survey, this method of arriving at an idea of the composition of households from third parties was tried in August Town, and a subsequent first-hand census revealed a significant disparity in the two sets of figures.

At the beginning of Chapter V of ‘Trinidad Village’ the point is made that, ‘The definition of the Toco family, in any functioning sense, must give a prominent place to the individual household’ (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947: 104).  With this we would agree whole-heartedly, and the disappointing fact is that the Herskovitses do not follow up this statement.  Apart from citing one case, the typicality of which we are unable to assess, the chapter is mainly devoted to a discussion of child-birth, child-rearing and the life-cycle, which stresses those aspects which are most susceptible of analysis in terms of the authors’ theory of persistence and reinterpretation of African culture.  This becomes even more clear when we turn to the theoretical discussion in Chapter XI, when an attempt is made to indicate ‘what of African custom has been retained, how this was integrated with the European conventions that were accepted, and how both these were reinterpreted in terms of one another’ (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947: 228).  It is precisely here that our main criticisms of this study must rest.

‘The division of Toco society into socio-economic groups, although cast in Euro-American patterns, is in accord with African tradition, and has been reinforced by continued African sanctions’ (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947: 228).  This is the opening statement of a paragraph that seems to contain a number of statements which permit of much more rigorous formulation, for to contend that status differentiation is a survival of ancestral African patterns is forcing the facts a great deal.  It is not even the form of status differentiation which is compared, but merely status differentiation per se.  In the first place we are told very little of the real nature of rank differentiation in the village beyond the fact that some people are poor and others are comfortably off.  Whilst in this paragraph it is stated that ‘in both areas [Africa and Toco] there is conscious striving to better the status of the individual and his family’ (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947: 228), we are left to assume that there is the possibility of considerable upward mobility and are told absolutely nothing of the operative colour-class system.

In the discussion of marriage and mating we find the statement that ‘here is a translation, in terms of the monogamic pattern of European mating, of basic West African forms that operate within a polygynous frame’ (M.J. and S.F. Herskovits 1947: 293).  This refers of course to the dual system of legal marriage and ‘keeping’, and this is equated with the disappearance of bride-price payments, and the consequent loss of legal control of the father over the children, except where he gives them financial support.  This idea is not developed to any great extent and we are left to guess just how the process of reinterpretation came about.

It is in the discussion of ritual and symbolism that the Herskovitses thesis is most convincing, and here their analyses are remarkably penetrating and well documented.  This brings us up against the core of the problem, which concerns the validity of a theoretical system based upon an all-embracing concept of culture.  Once the assertion is made that social structure is an aspect of culture, capable of transmission in exactly the same way as symbolism, the way is open for confusion.  Our contention is that the Herskovitses fail to analyse the contemporary social system fully; treat structure and culture as being of the same order of generality; and fail to recognize that these two orders of social facts need to be treated within different frames of reference.  Cultural symbols which are clearly derived from Africa may serve as vehicles for the expression of new values in Toco, or in the West Indies generally, and the tracing of their origins and their new integration into a coherent system is an important task for anthropology, admirably tackled by the Herskovitses.  Another impressive monographic study of this type is Miss Deren’s study of Haitian Vodun cults (Deren 1953).  However, the study of social structure does not respond to the methods used by Prof. and Mrs. Herskovits, and the prior task of sociology in this field is the elucidation of the social structure of a functioning system within a general theoretical framework which permits of comparative study at a higher level of abstraction than the purely descriptive.  The functional pre-requisites of social systems impose a limited number of possibilities of structuring, and this is particularly true if we begin to examine sub-systems of such a fundamental nature as domestic groups.  That there should be similarities between domestic groups in Trinidad and West Africa is not surprising.  There are similarities between domestic groups in Trinidad and Manchester and Cape Town and many other places, and a comparative study has to be based on a theoretical approach which is more refined than that of the culture concept.  Perhaps one of the most persuasive arguments against the Herskovitses’ interpretation of lower-class Negro family structure as a reinterpretation of basic African forms is the fact that in lower-class white society in the southern states of North America as described by Davis and Gardner one finds the same instability of marriage, and the same emphasis on the mother-child relationship (Davis 1941: 133–6).  There are considerable differences of course, but the similarities are striking and certainly cannot be explained, either by a reference to ‘African survivals’ or ‘European values’ whatever that might mean in this context.

In Life in a Haitian Valley we kind the same general approach to the problems as in Trinidad Village, but the method of analysis is laid out perhaps even more clearly.  The book begins with three chapters entitled ‘The African Heritage’, ‘What the Slaves Found in Haiti’ and ‘Working the Amalgam’.  Here we are presented with a brief picture of two cultures; ‘African’ and ‘French’, and then given a hypothetical account of how these two entities mingled with each other to form ‘Haitian’ culture.  Later on in the book we find such statements as:

The Africans who peopled Haiti, coming from cultures where descent is counted solely on the side of the mother or the father, and coming into contact with the French, whose custom binds children with equal strength to the families of both parents, molded both traditions into the social forms found today not only in Mirebalais, but in their essential outlines, throughout the Republic (M.J. Herskovits 1937: 122–3). [1]

Although there is in Herskovits’s work always the recognition of some kind of connectedness in social life, at the same time he does not hesitate to think in terms of the fusion of traits.  He starts with two ‘cultures’ which are presumably some kind of integrated wholes, then permits them to come into contact, a process which results in the exchange of traits which then become reintegrated into a new whole, which can be explained in terms of the process of fusion of the two original ‘cultures’.  Lines of thought on the social system which is ‘Haitian’ are very poorly developed, but enough material of a descriptive nature is provided to enable us to guess that Haitian peasant society has many structural features in common with other similar societies throughout the West Indies.  The equivalence of siblings in regard to inheritance is one such structural principle.  There is also some indication of the fact that in Haitian peasant society, men are important as the heads of extended families held together by common interests in land, this being of supreme importance as an economic asset.  However, we are not told whether women ever occupy this position, or of the distribution of rôles within the family.  Most important of all, we are once again told practically nothing of the position of the Negro peasant in the social system of Haiti as a whole, and no mention is made of the contemporary colour/class system.  That the identification of status with colour should have persisted in Haiti even after the virtual expulsion of the whites, says a great deal for the stability of the social system, and the values inherent in it, which developed under French Colonial rule.  This is a phenomenon which cannot be derived from either Europe or Africa, but it is symptomatic of the selective bias of Herskovits’s approach that this vitally important subject should have been omitted from serious consideration.

In the Negro communities of the southern states of the United States of America one finds many features of family life which are familiar to the student of West Indian Negro groups, and Franklin Frazier has produced a magnificently documented study of family organization in both the historical period when the Negroes were slaves, and in the present century (Frazier 1939).  Taking the diametrically opposed view to that adopted by Herskovits, Frazier contends that the Negro in North America has been stripped of his cultural heritage, and that the various types of Negro family organization found today have arisen as the result of experience under the slave regime, and more lately by a process of successful assimilation of the culture of the whites.

Within this world [the plantation] the slave mother held a strategic position and played a dominant rôle in the family groupings.  The tie between the mother and her younger children had to be respected not only because of the dependence of the child upon her for survival but often because of her fierce attachment to her brood …  On the whole, the slave family developed as a natural organization, based upon the spontaneous feelings of affection and natural sympathies which resulted from the association of the family members in the same household.  Although the emotional interdependence between the mother and her children generally caused her to have a more permanent interest the family than the father, there were fathers who developed an attachment for their wives and children (Frazier 1939: 481–2).

It is this primary natural bond of mother and children which persisted through all the break-up of local communities that took place at the time of emancipation in North America, and despite all the laxity in sexual mores encouraged by a life of deprivation.  Frazier recognizes that stable nuclear families consisting of a man, woman and their children developed when some of the ex-slaves ‘manage to get some education and buy homes’.  He says:

This has usually given the father or husband an interest in his family and has established his authority.  Usually such families sprang from the more stable, intelligent, and reliable elements in the slave population.  The emergence of this class of families from the mass of the Negro population has created small nuclei of stable families with conventional standards of sexual morality all over the South.  Although culturally these families may be distinguished from those of free ancestry, they have inter-married from time to time with the latter families.  These families represented the highest development of Negro family life up to the opening of the present century (Frazier 1939: 483–4).

The fact that the term ‘Negro’ is used in the United States to refer to any person possessing any proportion of Negro blood often tends to obscure certain colour differences which would be of paramount significance in the West Indies.  However, Frazier does point out that the ‘upper-class’ Negroes were predominantly of mulatto origin and tended to preserve their traditions of descent from ‘aristocratic’ white families.  The hierarchical grading within Negro society has been, and is, associated with differences in skin colour as in the West Indies, but, as Frazier points out, other factors have been operative as determinants of class status within the whole Negro group (using the term ‘Negro’ in the sense it is used in the United States).  What he calls ‘cultural attainments’, such as learning to speak ‘the uncorrupted language of the cultured whites’, have been important indices of higher rank, and these have usually been associated with economic success.  But it is with the increased urbanization of the Negro that opportunities have arisen for a real division into socio-economic classes based primarily on occupational differentiation, and despite the inferior status of the Negro vis-à-vis  the white group, considerable opportunity for social mobility based on economic achievement is in evidence.  It is in the urban areas that Negroes begin to engage in business activities, primarily within the Negro group.  However, even in the large cities of the United States of America the broad correlation of ‘middle-class’ status and lighter skin colour holds good, and there is the same tendency for upwardly mobile black men to marry lighter coloured women in order to consolidate their class status.  Frazier brings this out very clearly in his chapter on the ‘Brown Middle Class’ (Frazier 1939: 420).  Ample confirmation of our main thesis is contained in Frazier’s work, but in making judgments as to ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ development, he tends to shift attention from the structural correlations to a purely historical statement that a class differentiation has developed within the Negro group itself.

SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF THE FAMILY IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES

In 1946 Professor Simey published a book which has had considerable attention paid to it, both in Britain and in the West Indies (Simey 1946).  Simey’s main interest was in describing the existing conditions in the British West Indian Colonies in such a way that adequate plans for social welfare and development could be formulated, and in this he was no doubt successful if one is to judge by the amount of administrative action which has subsequently been taken.  However, our purpose is not to assess the adequacy of his proposals for improvement of social conditions, but to examine very briefly some of his statements about West Indian social organization, which have been accepted in many quarters as authoritative.  Simey himself makes it perfectly clear that his conclusions are not based upon any intensive first-hand study, but are compounded of general impressions, insights from the work of other writers, and what he describes as wholly inadequate statistical data.

Simey is acutely aware of the class and colour distinctions which exist in West Indian society, and he devotes considerable space to exploring the psychological implications of these divisions, drawing heavily on the work of Dollard in the United States (Dollard 1937).  However, it is not with this aspect of the work that we are concerned, but mainly with his discussion of the lower-class Negro family organization.  It is important to realize that he sees the lower-class Negro population as existing in a state of chronic poverty, underfed, and depending on irregular employment for a meagre income.  Citing Mr. Lewis Davidson he gives a classification of four types of family organization, this classification being based on data collected in seven different rural districts in Jamaica in 1943–4.  The information refers to 270 families, but the samples were not random in a statistical sense.  The four types are as follows:—

 (a) The Christian Family, based on marriage and a patriarchal order approximating to that of Christian families in other parts of the world;

(b) Faithful Concubinage, again based on a patriarchal order, possessing no legal status, but well established and enduring for at least three years;

(c) The Companionate Family, in which the members live together for pleasure and convenience, and for less than three years; and

(d) The Disintegrate Family, consisting of women and children only, in which men merely visit the women from time to time, no pattern of conduct being established.

The percentages of the various ‘types’ are Christian families 20 per cent, Faithful Concubinage families 29 per cent and types (c) and (d) combined, 51 per cent (Simey 1946:82–3).

To comment upon a piece of numerical information such as this with too much severity would be sheer pedantry, for it is doubtful whether Professor Simey would seriously claim the figures to be anything more than a rough guide.  However, certain conclusions which are drawn from rather vague pieces of factual information such as this, do require comment.  In the first place the categorization of families into the ‘types’ presented above suffers from the same drawbacks as that of Henriques’s to which we referred earlier (see Chapter IV).  It is extremely doubtful whether one could legitimately define any family group as really belonging to either category (c) or category (d).  Category (c) may be only an early stage of category (b), and unless much more information is given about families included in category (d) we don’t know whether they have previously been based on marriages or common-law marriages or whether they are incipient forms of category (b) or category (c).  The distribution figures indicating the number of legal marriages (which is presumably what ‘Christian families’ are based on), are quite remarkably low and they disagree substantially with the kind of proportions we find in British Guiana (see Chapters IV and V) and with those reported by Henriques for Jamaica (Henriques 1953).  The complete absence of any attempt to introduce a time perspective and see the various ‘types’ of family in their developmental aspect is a serious omission.

One of the conclusions reached by Simey, and here he is talking of the West Indies as a whole, is that:

the married state is something quite extraordinary, only open to those in higher walks of life, well endowed with worldly goods.  Faithful concubinage is largely an economic institution.  When the complementary wages earned by each partner form a more or less stable family income, then it may be assumed (there is no direct evidence for this) that this type of family is most secure.

The working classes all round the West Indies are firmly convinced that a wife (as distinct from a ‘keeper’ or such like) should not be expected to work for wages outside the family, that the furnishings of the house should be something approaching a lower middle-class standard, and that the wife should have a servant (Simey 1946: 85).

It should be clear from the data presented in Section II of this book that the above statements are simply incorrect so far as the communities we have studied in British Guiana are concerned.  Simey’s statements would be explicable if they had been made by a member of the middle-class, or the lower middle-class, for this is exactly the kind of stereotype of lower-class life which one hears in the urban centres from persons of middle-class status.

In many ways the work of Dr. Henriques is a more refined development of that of Simey, for he is carrying out a detailed investigation of a limited set of problems in a specific area.  The two books have much in common however, in so far as the treatment of the problems of family organization is concerned.

Henriques’s approach to Jamaican society is quite different from that of Herskovits, the other principal anthropological student of the West Indies, since he is much more concerned with understanding Jamaican family life in relation to the contemporary colour-class system, and only has a recourse to history to demonstrate the importance of the social situation in which this system came to fruition (Henriques 1953: 11–41).  We may pass over Dr.  Henriques’s strictures that a European investigator would not be able to obtain information because of the attitudes towards Europeans, by reminding him that there are more ways of obtaining information than by asking questions.  This is largely a matter of technique, and it must be admitted that there is a certain amount of difficulty involved for a European attempting to work with a coloured middle-class group, and obviously there would be fields of inquiry where one would expect a biased reaction, and any investigator who did not take this factor into account would be naïve in the extreme.  Henriques’s section on the colour/class system is descriptively sound, though there is very little attempt at any systematic analysis in relation to a general theory which would permit of comparison within a generalized framework.  There is competent empirical correlation of the three factors of colour, economic position and family pattern, and we shall concentrate our attention on this latter aspect of the study, and particularly on the lower-class family organization.

There is a brief discussion of historical causative factors underlying the forms of Jamaican family life, and Henriques tends to reject Herskovits’s thesis of the persistence of African elements, in favour of ‘slavery’ as a determining factor.  By ‘slavery’ we presume Henriques means the whole social system of which slavery was an integral part in the West Indies.  This is certainly a major advance on Herskovits’s work, for it brings us one step nearer to a view of West Indian society which takes cognizance of the functioning system which developed, and exists today in the West Indies, and to a certain extent throughout the New World wherever Negro groups are to be found.

One of the main limitations of Henriques’s work on Jamaican family structure is the lack of data which may be considered adequate for the type of analysis he attempts.  Census figures are hardly satisfactory since they do not deal in the categories necessary for the analysis.  Henriques stresses the importance of the domestic group as the central point of his analysis, but lacks the data to make more than very general statements concerning the distribution of various types.  He distinguishes four types of household group:—

A.  Christian family                                  B.  Faithful concubinage

C.  Maternal or Grandmother family     D.  Keeper family.

However, he is fully aware that these categories are not rigid, and mentions, without much further demonstration of the point, that any given household could experience all four categorical states during its existence through time.  This is a crucial point, for the classificatory scheme presented is essentially the result of trying to deal with the material by means of a rigidly synchronic view of empirical data.  Henriques speaks of the ‘typical monogamous family as if it were in a category quite apart from the other three, and if in fact this is so, it is extremely important.  He asserts that in this type of family, meals tend to be taken in common, and it is implied that such a family normally has a servant of some kind.  Unfortunately we don’t know just how ‘normal’ this is, though obviously some precise measure of normality in this context is required.  Eating together or not eating together is an important index to internal family relations, and if in fact there is such a basic difference between families of Henriques Type A, and Types B and D, in this respect, then we are faced with a situation which differs radically from that reported for other parts of the West Indies.  Since it is estimated that a good many people get married after having lived together for some time, do they then change their eating habits?  The situation as reported for Jamaica is so different from that in British Guiana that it raises important issues concerning the rôle of marriage in lower-class family life in the two areas.

The census figures quoted for the distribution of household heads by sex and conjugal status are tantalizingly vague.  The largest category of female heads is listed as ‘single’ but we have no means of telling how many of these persons are separated, common-law widows, or women who have never cohabited with a man at all.  This is equally true for the male heads in this category.

So far we have been dealing with the empirical aspects of this section of the monograph only, but it is clear that the vagueness in reporting of specific facts is connected with the absence of a generalized frame of reference by which such facts could be ordered.  In the concluding chapter of the book Henriques comes much nearer to formulating a general hypothesis concerning Jamaican society when he shows that domestic groupings in the lower-class are in part a function of the economic and colour/class system, within a general framework of what he has termed a disnomic society.  However, the implications of this approach are not at all clearly worked out.  He refers to ‘poverty’ as if it were in itself a causal factor instead of being merely a relative measurement of wealth, whereas, it would be more satisfactory to take poverty as a correlate of low social status which is the important social fact.

CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS

We have already had occasion to contrast certain features of Guianese Negro family structure with those found in societies as widely different as the Nayar of Malabar (see Chapter IX), the Hopi of Arizona (see Chapter IX), and so on, but if the hypothesis we developed earlier in this chapter is correct then it may be possible to test it against situation where a similar structural complex appears to exist.  This is not to claim that we are establishing the hypothesis by rigorous cross-cultural comparison of a statistically valid nature, but by a limited comparison we should be able to suggest lines for further inquiry.

Latin America

The area which is broadly designated ‘Latin America’ contains within it several sub-areas where the autochthonous groups of American Indians form a substantial proportion of the population.  Generally speaking these Indian groups are over-laid with Spanish and mixed Spanish-Indian groups, the three groups being arranged in some kind of hierarchy in approximately the same fashion that we find Negro, Coloured and White groups in the British West Indies.  A great deal of anthropological work has been carried out in these communities, primarily by North American scholars, and it is proposed to examine firstly, one community study undertaken by Dr. John Gillin in Peru during a six-months field trip in 1944 (Gillin 1945).  The series of studies of which this is a part were concerned primarily with problems of acculturation in mixed Indian-European rural communities.  In a foreword Julian H.  Steward says: ‘They [the studies] are essentially acculturational, the various communities selected for investigations ranging in degree of assimilation from self-sufficient and self-contained preliterate Indian groups to strongly mestizoized, literate, Spanish-speaking villages, which are more or less integrated into national life’ (Gillin 1945: vii).

The conception of the studies is basically similar to that propounded by Robert P.  Redfield in his classic monograph on the differential ‘Westernization’ of Yucatan communities, and in many ways it resembles the culture-historical approach used by Herskovits in his study of West Indian Negro communities (see Redfield 1941).  At the moment we are less concerned with the general theoretical approach, than with the reported facts, but we must bear in mind that Gillin was working within the tradition of ‘culture contact’ studies.

Moche lies on the coast of Peru, seven miles from the city of Trujillo on the road to Lima.  Its aboriginal population is descended from the people who possessed the archaeological culture known as Mochica, but although there is a consciousness that the present day Mocheros are a distinctive group, being more ‘Indian’ and more conservative than other coastal villagers, there is no historical tradition in the community of descent from an ancient Peruvian civilization.  Moche itself is one of a series of villages, which are generally known as ‘Mochica villages’ but there is no organization uniting them as such, no common tradition of origin, and although social intercourse between their inhabitants tends to be more frequent than with other communities, it is by no means exclusively so.  Spanish is the only language spoken, all the original Indian languages having disappeared.  The inhabitants of Moche are not all Indian, and the classification of the Peruvian National Census for 1940 gave the following figures for Moche district (Gillin 1945: 98).

                                                                                      Male                   Female             Total

White and Mestizo                               914                    978                1,892

Indians                                                    921                    978                1,849

Yellow (Chinese and Japanese)            12                        2                     14

Undeclared                                              10                        8                     18

Negro                                                      None              None               None

                        Total Population                                                            3,773

Gillin says that the above figures must be taken cautiously especially as regards the division into Indian, Mestizo and White.  As far as he is concerned the principal internal division in Moche is between ‘true Mocheros’ and forasteros.  The latter are ‘strangers’ and seem to include the ‘whites’ as well as a large number of ‘Peruvians’ who would probably fall into the category of Mestizo rather than pure Indian.  In any case Gillin is of the opinion that the ‘pure Indian’ element is not, strictly speaking, racially pure, but the term ‘Indian’ includes both racial and cultural characteristics.  There are some 500 forasteros as opposed to 3,178 ‘true Mocheros’, and they rarely engage in agriculture as do the Mocheros.  He characterizes the ‘true Mocheros’ as being ‘more Indian’ than outsiders, thus giving an ethnic designation to this group despite the apparent discrepancy with the census figures.  This would seem to indicate that many of the ‘true Mocheros’ group returned themselves as Mestizo, despite their general classification in a sociological sense as s ‘Indian’.

The economy of the village is based upon irrigation agriculture, the surplus produce being sold in the towns, but an increasing number of Mocheros work for cash wages outside the village.  It is in no sense a subsistence economy, and cash crops are important.  The Mocheros women engage in trade, selling the farm produce, but nevertheless,

trading, as an occupation in itself, seems to hold little interest for the people.  All retail establishments in Moche pueblo itself are in the hands either of forasteros or of extanjeros, and I am not aware that any Mochero has left the community to set up or take part in a strictly trading or commercial enterprise elsewhere (Gillin 1945: 13).

The Chinese and Japanese are shopkeepers, tinsmiths and traders, as are a few of the other forasteros.  There is a sense of marked difference between the Mocheros and forasteros and Gillin suggests that ‘the resistance and reserve toward forasteros shown by Mocheros in their personal relations is rooted in fear for their land’ (Gillin 1945: 71).

So far we have a general background picture of a situation not very different from that with which we have been dealing in British Guiana.  The ‘true Mocheros’ would correspond roughly to what we have designated the ‘Negro’ community in August Town, for example.  There we have referred to a village ‘upper-class’ and to various Chinese, Portuguese and Coloured elements which are set off in greater or lesser degree from the bulk of the village population.  It is also true that the Negro villagers of August Town are not racially pure in a biological sense, but they are regarded as ‘black people’.  Both within Moche and within August Town there is a lack of business initiative on the part of most people, and nearly all shops etc., are in the hands of forasteros, and Chinese and Portuguese, respectively.  Both communities are based on mixed wage earning and subsistence economies.  Both ‘true Mocheros’ and the ‘black people’ of August Town are low status groups in a total society stratified in terms of an ethnic class system.  Structurally they are comparable.

Mocheros live in houses that are quite different in construction from those in our Guianese villages, but they are about the same size and the furnishings are similar with Guiana being a little better off as regards the number of display items.  Gillin asserts that there are no social classes which are ‘formally defined and recognized in Moche, but there are differences in wealth or expenditure …’ (Gillin 1945: 42).  The areas of land owned and worked by Mocheros are small, and the average holding is about 3.9 acres, composed of scattered plots of less than 1,000 square metres.  Land is inherited in both lines and,

Transfer from the older to the younger generation is made by gift before death, by written testament, and by customary division if the deceased has died intestate.  In the latter case, my informants tell me that it has been customary for the spouse to receive half of the property in life trust, as it were, with the remainder divided equally among the children and their mother’s share reverting, share and share alike, to them on her death (Gillin 1945: 71). [My italics.]

Since land still forms a most important basis for money-making in Moche, where the trend towards working outside the community for wages is still developing, there are a great number of legal disputes over land.  This contrasts with the situation in the Guianese communities, but the type of inheritance is identical, with all children getting an equal share (see Smith 1955).

Gillin’s data on family organization and household composition are rather meagre, for as he says, he never actually lived in the community, and the field tour was not long enough to collect adequate statistical data.  However, he noted immediately the dominant position of women.  They control finances and whilst the men are responsible for agricultural production, the women do all the marketing and handle all domestic funds.  Families keep a small amount of savings for sickness or funerals in much the same way Guianese villagers keep a ‘canister’, but these are never large.  Shops only extend limited credit, so that there is no chronic indebtedness.

The normal Moche household contains only a nuclear family of spouses and their unmarried children.  Although the man is nominal head of the household, it is the woman who is the dominant partner controlling the finances and the running of the household.  ‘Both parents discipline the children, although infants are handled almost exclusively by women’ (Gillin 1945: 98).  Where quarrels occur between spouses, beating of men by the women is as common as the opposite (Gillin 1945: 99).  We are told very little else about the internal relationships of household members.

There is the familiar pattern of early heterosexual activity, and illegitimacy is common.  The offspring of youthful affairs suffer no social disabilities.

As a result of these affairs not a few girls have children, called niños de la calle, ‘children of the street’.  They are not thrown out of the house or disowned by outraged fathers, nor, in fact, is any serious obstacle put in the way of their continued normal social development.  If the father of the child is economically suitable to the girl, her parents will try to force the pair into setting up a household together; if not, the girl and her child continue to live with her parents.  Practically all such girls eventually settle down with some man and form a family without any  great social stigma attached either to them or to the child.  Men do not disdain to marry or to set up a household with an unmarried mother.  The main bar to illicit unions is Church disapproval.  The guilt felt on, this score, however, is somewhat assuaged by having illegitimate children properly baptized in the church (Gillin 1945: 95).

Marital customs also follow very closely those found in Guiana, and Gillin distinguishes three types of marriage—de facto, de jure and de religio—corresponding to customary, legal and church marriage, though he says that legal or civil marriage is rarely found without church marriage (Gillin 1945: 99).

‘An informal type of marriage, more common than the formal, is accomplished by the couple simply starting to live together …’ (Gillin 1945: 97).  Couples live together in customary unions for long periods of time, often converting the union into a legal and religious marriage after the birth of children.  Divorce is practically unknown, but marriages break up, and the couples may settle in customary unions with other persons.  There are no organized and lasting kin groups wider than the immediate family, but Gillin mentions the fact that

There are a few exceptions in which a group of siblings and other kinsmen maintains a certain solidarity and unity.  In all cases the unity seems to be imposed by the personal influence of a ‘matriarch’, an old woman, usually the mother of the siblings (Gillin 1945: 101).

This is admittedly vague, but the very fact that it is noted is significant from our point of view.

Without carrying our comparison further into the realms of religion, magical beliefs, drinking habits, etc., enough has been cited to show that there are striking similarities between this Peruvian community and the Negro villages of Guiana on the other side of the continent.  The similarities are particularly interesting since the Mocheros are not Negroes, nor do any Negroes live in Moche district, which means that the structural forms we find there cannot be explained away in terms of an African heritage.  What is even more interesting is that Moche social structure is clothed in a completely different set of customs, manners, beliefs etc.  In other words it is culturally distinct from the Negro communities of the West Indies.

From Gillin’s discussion of the cultural position of Moche, at the end of his report, it seems clear that the Mocheros are sufficiently integrated into Peruvian life for them to share a large number of the common values of Peruvian society.  In this sense Moche is much more ‘mestizoized’ than a community such as the Mexican village of Tepoztlan studied by Redfield and Lewis, or the pueblo of San Luis Jilotepeque, Guatemala, described by Tumin (Redfield 1930; Lewis 1951; Tumin 1952).  In San Luis the Indians appear to retain a considerable degree of cultural autonomy and maintain an internal prestige hierarchy which is related to the holding of ‘offices’ requiring a good deal of skill in matters of Indian ritual.  Here also the family system appears to accord a much greater degree of importance to the husband-father rôle which is consonant with the greater importance of the farm as the sole basis of subsistence and the participation of men in the positively valued Indian prestige hierarchy. [2]

Tepoztlan presents a much more fluid situation than that found in San Luis Jilotepeque.  Redfield maintained that there were clear-cut differences between the low status group of tontos, and the higher status group of correctos, the latter being more versed in the culture of the city.  Lewis contends that this division does not correspond to any real division of the population into social groups, but merely represents an ideal dichotomy in value judgments about the behaviour of individuals.  However he does imply that there is some form of social stratification within the village, and it is clear that wealth differences, cultural differences and racial differences all enter into the determination of status, at least to some extent, though from Lewis’s descriptions we are unable to assess just how far.  Since the status system of the village is not adequately related to the wider social system of Mexico, we must regard the discussion as inadequate from our point of view, but it does seem fairly clear that cultural and economic differentiations override racial distinctions to a more marked degree than they do in the West Indies.  Lewis does not dwell upon the variability of family structure with socio-economic status, but speaking of the internal relations of the household group he says:—

In contrast to the wife’s central rôle within the home, the husband’s actual participation in family and household affairs is minimal.  His work, with the exception of hauling water and making occasional repairs in and around the house, is outside the home.  The division of labor is clear-cut, and the husband, except in emergencies, never does anything in connection with the house or children.  For the majority of men, the home is a place where they have their physical needs attended to.  Men are away from home a good part of the day, and sometimes for several days at a time, depending upon their work and the season of the year.

The history of Tepoztlan has been such that men frequently were forced to leave the village for long periods, and it is interesting to speculate on the effect of this on family life.  We know that many Tepoztecans had to work in the mines of distant Tasco and on far away haciendas during the early sixteenth century.  This pattern continued in modified form throughout the colonial period and until the Revolution.  Before the Revolution, large numbers of men worked on the neighbouring haciendas and returned to the village only once every two weeks.  Even today, about 150 men work on the haciendas during four to six months of the dry season, returning home once a week.  With the husband away, the wife was not only head of the family but also often had to find means of supporting herself and the children until his return (Lewis 1951: 321)

Elsewhere Lewis describes the family system as being strongly patriarchal, and clearly we must not be misled into thinking that wherever we find matri-focal household groups we must also find men without any form of authority or control.  Even in the villages with which we are concerned in British Guiana it would be untrue to say that men have absolutely no authority, but even so the use of the word ‘patriarchal’ in relation to the situation as reported for Tepoztlan is, to say the least, uninformative.  In a society such as Nupe which is technically patrilineal, Nadel points out quite clearly that a ‘real’ situation can exist where authority in the household is largely surrendered to women on account of their command of economic resources (see Nadel 1942).  In Tepoztlan the situation is not dissimilar, though the rôle of men as providers is as well marked as it is in British Guiana.

If Lewis had provided more data on the variation of family type with socio-economic status we should have been in a better position to utilize his work for comparison.  The ethnic distinctions in Tepoztlan are obviously of less direct importance than they are in the West Indies, and from this point of view there may be much to be learned of the possible lines of development in the West Indies if ascriptively based status differentiations give way even more to status based on criteria of achievement.  From Lewis’s remarks on the lack of eagerness to ‘get on’ in the world, it seems likely that there is at least a section of the village community where the ‘ethos’ is not much different to that found in our villages.

Scotland

The Scottish mining community studied by a team of British anthropologists in 1948-50 provides us with a unit of comparison which has the advantage of having practically no similarity of historical background to the Guianese case.  One member of the research team, Miss Shirley Wilson, concentrated upon a study of the neighbourhood and family complex and it is to her work we shall refer (Wilson 1953).  It must be admitted at the outset that there is considerable danger in a comparison of this kind, of abstracting certain facts from their context, but the limited material available on this Scottish community seems suggestive enough to warrant its inclusion here.

Although she calls her dissertation ‘The Family and Neighbourhood in a British Community’, it is really a study of the family in relation to the variability in the status system.  Social status is largely correlated with territorial clustering in the sense that each street in the town seems to be ranked in some way, although there are some streets inhabited by a series of families belonging to different parts of the status scale.  Miss Wilson decided that it is impossible to draw rigid lines dividing the population into various ‘classes’, and she tries to see the situation as a ‘gradient’ of statuses with persons tending towards one of two sets of polar values and polar types.  On the one hand there is the ‘lower-status’ pole, and on the other the ‘white-collar higher-status’ pole.  Persons tending towards the ‘lower-status’ end of the scale can be separated off into a group characterized by a whole series of factors of which occupation is the most significant.  The occupational scale is divided into ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ jobs and this corresponds to the major status division.  Miss Wilson develops her thesis with skill, showing how there is a basic dichotomy in social values between the two main status groups.  The higher status group is the socially mobile group imbued with values laying stress on the importance of ‘getting on’, and the moral necessity for improving one’s status; in short that complex of values sometimes referred to as the Protestant ethic (see Weber 1930).  What interests us particularly is the fact that it is possible to separate out so clearly a lower status group which is occupationally differentiated, recruited mainly by birth, and tending to cluster in territorial units.  It is characterized by its own internal value system which gives it a solidarity lacking in the higher status groups, and it is the nature of these values that we find so strikingly similar to those in our Guianese villages.  In contrast to the higher status group there is no emphasis on ‘getting on’ in terms of rising up an occupational ladder, and jobs within the lower status range are ranked in terms of the immediate remuneration.  Lower status group values always stress the present, and there is no emphasis placed on planning, saving, or working towards long term goals involving a change in status.

in the ideology of the lower status people, success has radically different implications; it does not bring primarily an increase in social status.  Success is often interpreted more simply in terms of getting money (Wilson 1953: 76).

Emphasis on the short term goal is evident in other spheres, such as the use of leisure.  Whereas the higher status conception of leisure is that it should be used ‘constructively’ and devoted to activities which either emphasize, or improve, social status, the lower status group demands immediate relaxation in its leisure time and contrasts play very strongly with work.

Generally for people in manual and unskilled jobs, enjoyment and pleasure from leisure activities is held to exist when these are divorced from the aspects of learning and of the long term moral benefit.  The completeness of the contrast between work and play is emphasized by people in the lower status jobs (Wilson 1953: 56).

Patterns of consumption and expenditure are also radically different as between the two groups.

Generally, higher status expenditure tends to be concentrated on the collection of material goods, or on such activities as higher education which brings some measurable and observable result in terms of increased status, whereas lower status expenditure is devoted mainly to more consumable objects.( Wilson 1953: 57).

‘Homes of very low status are sometimes devoid of all furniture and equipment apart from a few necessary items’ (64).  For the ‘white collar’ group, ‘the “Moral” use of expenditure is considered to be that which is status giving or status-revealing’ whilst for the lower status group ‘saving and thrift are sometimes thought to signify “meanness”’ (Wilson 1953: 60).

It is clear even from the very brief summary given above that there is a basic similarity in the values of the lower status group described by Miss Wilson, and in the Negro groups studied in Guiana.  Both groups occupy low status in a stratified society, though of course in Guiana, skin colour presents a more permanent and distinguishing badge of status and inhibits mobility to a greater extent.  Nevertheless, the Scottish community displays the same general characteristics, and even though upward mobility is theoretically possible for the lower status group, it does not prevent an acceptance of low status, and a development of solidarity which lays stress on this acceptance and discourages upward mobility.  Miss Wilson sees quite clearly that ideas about the nature of the total society will vary from group to group, and she says,

The emphasis on democracy is less evident among lower-status people than among higher-status people and the society is sometimes spoken of as divided by ‘class barriers’.  This is an interesting reflection of the weaker social mobility of lower status people; since they neither value it, or achieve it to the same extent, they tend to assume that it cannot and does not exist’ (Wilson 1953: 78).

The pre-occupation with status which is characteristic of the higher status group means that the family system must be compatible with the social mobility of its members.  There is a shrinkage of kin ties and a relative isolation of the conjugal family as in America (see Parsons 1949).  Greater stress is laid upon clique and association membership which can be manipulated to improve status, and even within the elementary family the internal relationships are adjusted to allow or even encourage the mobility of children at the expense of the solidarity of the family itself.  The occupation of the husband-father becomes of prime importance in determining the status of the family as a unit, but on the other hand the necessity for children to try to improve on their acquired hereditary status means that elementary families tend to liquidate themselves in the shortest possible time.  In the lower status group the situation is quite different, and whereas the upper status woman feels that she must not interfere with her married children, the lower status woman often takes over the upbringing of her daughter’s children almost completely.  Even when higher status people live quite close to kinsfolk there is the feeling that one must not ‘interfere’, and the self-sufficiency of the conjugal unit is always stressed.

Among lower status people, not only do relatives often live near to each other, since they are not scattered by the demands of social mobility, but the affectional relationships may be close and the sentimental tie is often expressed in day-to-day life, through the sharing of leisure time contacts, the borrowing of household articles and money, the informal visiting of homes, the care of the children and so on (Wilson 1953: 234–5).

Of particular interest to us is the strong emphasis laid upon the bond between mother and daughter, and the social importance of ‘Mum’.  Young married couples often live with the wife’s parents, and even if they don’t, married daughters may visit their mothers every day and they go to the cinema together, do their shopping together, etc.  The sharing of a household with the wife’s mother is not regarded as merely a temporary expedient, and Wilson records one case where a couple lived with the wife’s mother for eighteen years before they got a home of their own.  In 1946, 40 per cent of the children born in the town, to town mothers, were born at the home of the maternal grandparents and only a few of these were in the streets of the three highest grades.

The maternal grandmother takes a significant part in the upbringing of the child, and where both mother and grandmother live in the same house the grandmother may take over completely to all intents and purposes.

At least three-quarters of the children in low-grade streets are bottle-fed so that even the intimate physical act of nourishment is taken from the mother and transferred to the grandmother (Wilson 1953: 237).

So far as marriage is concerned the lower status girl places great emphasis on ‘fate’, good looks, and luck in finding a partner and is but little concerned about status compatibility as are higher status individuals.  Sex and physical attractiveness become important elements, and one labourer’s daughter said ‘All the people I know say that marriage is 90 per cent bed.  And that’s what I think’ (Wilson 1953: 255).  In the lower status group, the proportion of civil marriages as opposed to church marriages is much higher than in the higher status groups, and a civil marriage is regarded as a sign of social inferiority, implying an element of impermanence.  Divorce occurs almost solely in the lower status group, and in the period January 1940 to May 1950 there were eighty-eight divorces, and only four of the individuals involved came from streets in the upper three grades, all the rest coming from the three lowest grades of streets.  Forty-six of the men and fifty-four of the women came from mining families.

Illegitimacy is both more frequent and less severely condemned in lower status families, and of 117 illegitimate births recorded between 1940 and 1949, only six of the mothers came from streets in the three upper grades.  Nearly one third of all first born children in the community are either illegitimate or premaritally conceived, but the pressure to conformity results in many girls getting married before the first child is born so that the illegitimacy rate is much lower than it would otherwise be.  Wilson relates the limitation of family size in the higher status groups to the desire for upward mobility, and remarks on the much more fatalistic attitude towards repeated pregnancies in the lower status homes where a greater number of children doesn’t matter so much, since there is less concern for giving them all a good start on the road to higher status.

In the lower status group, adolescence is less marked by intergenerational conflict than in those groups where status differences between parents and children are becoming more marked, for since there is a tendency towards uniformity of type of occupation in the lower status group there is less emphasis on increasing social differentiation.  Eating habits vary considerably between the two groups and the lower status homes place little emphasis on regular meal times at which everyone sits down together.  There is more buying from fish-and-chip shops, cake-shops etc., and children are given food at odd intervals rather than at set meal times.

Miss Wilson deals only cursorily with the conjugal relationship, and tells us very little of the position of men in relation to their families of procreation, but it seems clear that the stress on matri-filiation in the lower status groups, exemplified by the frequency of matri-local residence and the close bond between mother and married daughter, tends to shift the focus of the household to the woman.  It would be wrong to assume complete identity between this Scottish family structure and that found in British Guiana.  In the Scottish case the total social situation is much more culturally homogeneous, and legal marriage is much more widely accepted as the normal framework for conjugal unions and childbearing.  Miss Wilson’s analysis does bring out the correlation between a lengthened matri-line and the maternal-grandmother rôle on the one hand, and low status involving a negative emphasis on status mobility on the other.  It suggests that the general principles which enter into the structuring of Guianese Negro households may be operative here, but a great deal more research would have to be done on this type of urban community before an adequate case could be maintained.

CONCLUSION

Without extending the range of our discussion any further it is evident that we have raised many fundamental problems merely by juxta-posing the material from several different ‘culture areas’ as we have done.  What we have done, essentially, is to take two main features of the social systems we have dealt with; social stratification and family structure; and describe some aspects of their interrelations in the different societies.  We started out by trying to understand the structure of the family in three village communities in British Guiana, and an attempt was made to analyse this structure as fully as possible in the main section of this work.  Inevitably we came up against the old problem of whether the nature of family relations in New World Negro society is to be explained in terms of historical factors such as the survival of African patterns of behaviour, the peculiar conditions existing on the slave plantations or whether we could advance more plausible hypotheses in terms of the functional requirements of an on-going social system.  It has been remarked that there is a fundamental similarity between the  types of family structure found in Negro communities all over the New World, and of course if one regards this unit as a clearly defined ‘culture area’, there is a tendency to try to explain its unity and peculiar characteristics in terms of a set of factors peculiar to it alone.  The very concept of culture held by the majority of scholars who have worked in the area has tended towards this type of analysis, for culture in this sense is essentially an historical concept, and culture contact becomes a process of exchange of culture traits over a period of time.  The same type of analysis has been employed by scholars working in the Latin-American field, and it seems truly remarkable that the two areas—Latin American and New World Negro—should have been treated in such a completely separatist manner.  If the same kind of approach had been adopted toward the problems of African anthropology it is difficult to see how the advances in comparative social structure in Africa could have developed.  Had societies been classified according to their complexes of culture traits alone, without reference to their structure, then presumably a book such as African Political Systems or African Systems of Kinship and Marriage could never have been written (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll-Forde 1950).

Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean area we are dealing with societies that all exhibit similar structural features, and this gives the whole region a unity which is not to be found in a comparison of the particular cultural symbols through which the structure is given meaning.  Admittedly both areas have been subject to not dissimilar sequences of historical events, since both have been areas of colonization of European powers.  But since quite different ‘cultures’ have been involved, Amerindian and African, we should expect the resulting situation to be quite different in the two areas.  In terms of our definition of culture, we do in fact find that the contemporary ‘cultures’ in the two areas are very different indeed.  Radcliffe-Brown speaks of a ‘cultural tradition’ as the process of handing down knowledge, skills, ideas, belief, tastes and sentiments, which are thus acquired by other persons through the learning process (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 4).  A more precise and systematic statement, and one with which we would substantially agree is made by Talcott Parsons, when he says ‘It is [such] a shared symbolic system which functions in interaction which will here be called a cultural tradition’ (Parsons 1952: 11).  If culture is a system of shared symbolic meanings which make communication possible in an ordered social life, then it is the way in which actions are carried out that interests us when discussing ‘culture’.  Thus, when a Mochero dies, the church bells are rung in almost the same way that they are in August Town, but when the velorio is held on the night following the death, although it seems to have exactly the same functions as a Guianese ‘wake’ in expressing a sense of communal loss etc., the details of the way in which the body is laid out, the women weep, and so on are quite different.

If we look at all the societies we have mentioned in this section we find a correlation between low social status in a stratified society, and a type of family system in which men seem to lack importance as authoritarian figures in domestic relations.  These are facts of social structure, and the arrangement of these structural elements is basically similar despite marked variations in their corresponding cultural complexes in different societies.  We are really dealing with sub-systems of the several societies, although certain aspects of the total societies are basically comparable.  In all cases the subgroups with which we are most immediately concerned constitute relatively solidary groups, differentiated with respect to other groups in the society, but internally relatively undifferentiated so far as status is concerned.

If our analysis is correct then it raises certain issues of general importance.  It would suggest that there is a rewarding field for comparative study between Latin American and West Indian societies using a structural frame of reference.  The relations of racial or ethnic groups become special cases of a general theory of social stratification, and ‘acculturation’ has to be seen in the light of continuing social differentiations of a certain kind.

Cultural traditions of certain ethnic sub-groups may be found to persist as indices of status differentiation rather than as a result of geographical isolation.  Leach has graphically shown how even linguistic differences can persist between households in one local community provided there is a structural base for such cultural differentiation, and his conclusion that culture and structure appear to vary independently is borne out by our researches, though there is always the possibility that the independent variability is merely apparent at the particular level of abstraction at which we are working (Leach 1954: 288–90).