Charles V. Carnegie
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 1996-1997
Looking Beyond the Nation
State
When he was an undergraduate at Cornell, Charles V. (Val) Carnegie began to
question some of the anthropological models he was being taught in light of
his experience growing up in Jamaica, West Indies. "Traditional kinship
categories, for instance, don't apply to the Caribbean, where the boundaries
between kin and non-kin are blurred," Carnegie said. "Anthropology's
focus on groups that are separate and constant in structure seems to be both
its strength and its problem."
In Postnationalism Prefigured: The Social Border
Zones of Caribbean Nation States, Carnegie presents a critique of the
social science paradigm that views cultures as fixed and unchanging. Drawing
on a wide range of Caribbean social historical and contemporary ethnographic
materials, including his own fieldwork, Carnegie proposes a more flexible approach
to the concept of nation states, one that emphasizes heterogeneity and border
transgression.
"The book explores a number of areas that point to the
persistence of transterritorial and transnational currents in Caribbean social
life over the past few hundred years," Carnegie said. These areas include
the history of social interaction between Europeans and African slaves; the black
diaspora political movement founded by Marcus Garvey in the early twentieth century;
and the contemporary inter-island traders, most of them women, who build social
networks that cross national lines. Postnationalism Prefigured closes
by urging anthropologists to consider models of world community, discussing the
Baha'i faith as one example of an international community that seeks to balance
unity with diversity.
Carnegie argues that some of the most central tenets of Western
scholarship—the assumption that things fit into neat categories, and the
focus on countability, homogeneity, and distinctness of categories—do not
fit the modern Caribbean situation. "The social sciences," he writes, "tend
to neglect, erase, or want to regulate social phenomena of the sort this book
makes visible: the crisscrossing of frontiers by slaves before emancipation,
the activities of inter-island traders, and the pariah treatment accorded to
albinos whose presence is a glaring anomaly for the racial classification system."
Carnegie further suggests the existence in the Caribbean,
and perhaps in human nature, of a pervasive resistance, at once conscious and
unconscious, to prevailing Western paradigms. "The modern assumption that
we can explain everything and solve every problem has within it so much that
is counterhuman, that is demeaning and draining of art and poetry," he observed. "Why
do so many people like to visit Santa Fe, with its narrow, irregular, crooked
streets? We are attracted to places that confound; we long for inefficiencies.
Spiritual pursuits too attract because they offer a frontier that is unattainable
and mysterious."
During his SAR residency, Carnegie took advantage of analogous
opportunities to explore the offbeat in writing his book. "Being here has
allowed me to go off on intellectual tangents I really wanted to go off on," he
said. "The School is an incredible place for daydreaming, which, by allowing
me to imagine and conceptualize differently, is a vital part of my work."
Affiliation at time of award: Associate professor
of anthropology and African American studies at Bates College.
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Scholars 1996-97
