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Revitalization Movements as Indicators of Completed Acculturation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Margaret Sanford
Affiliation:
Longwood College

Extract

Revitalization movements have been viewed, when found within a culture contact situation, as a retrogression, a backward step in acculturation of a subordinate society to the customs and values of another. The return to celebration of differences between themselves and the people of the dominant group has been viewed as just another hurdle to be overcome before integration of the subordinate group could be brought about.

Type
Religious Movements
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1974

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References

I wish to thank Regina Flannery-Herzfeld for reading and commenting upon drafts of this paper. Field work was carried out in the year 1969 under the direction of Michael Kenny, Department of Anthropology, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

1 Cf. Kopytoff, Igor, ‘Classification of Religious Movements: Analytical and Synthetic’, Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion. Proceedings of the 1964 Annual Spring Meetings of the American Ethnological Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 85.Google Scholar

2 Mead, Margaret, New Lives for Old (New York: New American Library, 1956)Google Scholar; Spicer, Edward H. (ed.), Perspectives in American Indian Culture Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 21 ff.Google Scholar; Chance, Norman, ‘Acculturation, Self-Identification, and Personality Adjustment’, American Anthropologist, LXVII (1965), pp. 372–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For example, the Mayos described by Crumrine, N. Ross and Crumrine, Lynne S. in ‘Where Mayos Meet Mestizos: A Model for the Social Structure of Culture Contact’, Human Organization, XXVIII (Spring, 1969), pp. 50–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the Delaware Indians are described by Newcomb, William W. Jr., in The Culture and Acculturation of the Delaware Indians. Papers, Museum of Anthropology No. 10, University of Michigan (1956); the Tuscarora living on the outskirts of Niagara Falls, New YorkGoogle Scholar, and the Isleta Pueblo, near Albuquerque, New Mexico, mentioned by Vogt, Evon in ‘The Acculturation of American Indians’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CCCXI, pp. 137–46.Google Scholar

4 See SSRC Summer Seminar on Acculturation, which emphasized intra-cultural characteristics in conceptualizing acculturation; Acculturation: An Exploratory Formulation’, American Anthropologist, LVI (December 1954), pp. 9731002.Google Scholar

5 One of the most extensive and widely discussed efforts in conceptualizing the evident lack of acculturation in so-called ‘plural societies’, although the groups might have been in contact for an extended period, was that of Smith, M. G., The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965). Smith‘s efforts were bent to analyzing differences in basic values which were seen as keeping societies as distinct entities in colonial and former colonial areas.Google Scholar

6 Evon Vogt suggested attention be given to surrounding societies (op. cit., p. 144)Google Scholar; David French reported an example in which barriers to integration of an Indian group came from the White Society, ‘Wasco-Wishram’, in Spicer, Edward H. (ed.), Perspectives in American Indian Culture Change, pp. 337430.Google Scholar Also see Stern, Theodore, The Klamath Tribe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), p. 262)Google Scholar, and Murphy, Robert F., ‘Social Change and Acculturation’, Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Ser. II, Vol. XXVI, No. 7 (1964), pp. 845–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Morton Fried, discussing the problem of ‘tribe’, points out that frequently they are what they are more as a reaction to others’ attitude toward them than from any distinctiveness inhering as a group, ‘On the Concept of “Tribe” and “Tribal Society” ’, in Essays on the Problem of Tribe. Proceedings of the 1967 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 320.Google Scholar See also Mary Helms’ analysis of the Miskito to the same effect, The Cultural Ecology of a Colonial Tribe’, Ethnology, VIII (January 1969), pp. 7684.Google Scholar

7 Liebow, Elliot, Tally's Corner (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967)Google Scholar, and Valentine, Charles A., Culture and Poverty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).Google Scholar

8 Newcomb, , op. cit.Google Scholar

9 Erasmus, Charles J., Man Takes Control (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961), pp. 262 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Liebow, (op. cit.)Google Scholar and Valentine, (op. cit.)Google Scholar called attention to similarities in value orientations of black Americans to those of the general society. As early as 1925 Herskovits claimed that ‘total cultural assimilation’ of Africans had already occurred, Herskovits, Melville, ‘The Negro's Americanism’, in Locke, Alain (ed.), The New Negro (New York: Charles and Albert Bain, 1925).Google Scholar

11 Chance, , op. cit., p. 372.Google Scholar

12 Murphy, , op. cit.Google Scholar

13 I adopt the distinction between societal and individual integration set forth by the Crumrines in a recent analysis of the same phenomenon with which I deal in this paper: early acceptance of the influences of another culture and the later rejection of that culture and a return to the ‘traditional’ culture. By ‘societal integration’ the Crumrines mean a social structure of contact in which the individuals in contact represent statuses of fixed membership groups. By ‘individual integration’ they mean a social structure of contact characterized by individuals defined as persons; Crumrine and Crumrine, , op. cit., 50–1.Google Scholar

14 Smith, M. G., ‘West Indian Culture’, Caribbean Quarterly, VII (1961), pp. 112–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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16 Taylor, Douglas Macrae, The Black Carib of British Honduras (New York: Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 17, 1951).Google Scholar

17 Burdon, John Alder (ed.), Archives of British Honduras, Vols. I, II, and III (London: Sifton, Praed & Co., 1934).Google Scholar

18 Cf. Solien, Nancie [Gonzalez], ‘West Indian Characteristics of the Black Carib’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, XV (1959), pp. 300–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Burdon, , III, 58, 63, 67.Google Scholar

20 The Centenary Number of the Methodist Record, The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine of the Honduras District (Belize: Goodrich, 1927), pp. 9, 10.Google Scholar

21 Seine Bight is a small Carib village down the coast about twenty-five miles from Stann Creek and about sixty miles from Belize by sea. I am pleased to record here that the first issue of The Angelus referred to it as ‘Sin Bight’, perhaps reflecting the wishful thinking of an earnest young pastor. The Angelus was a publication of the Catholic Church in Belize from 1886 until 1902, when it was discontinued. I am indebted to Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Burn of Belize for their generosity in permitting me to read their set of The Angelus.

22 The Angelus, 1888: 222.Google Scholar

23 Leon, Narda, ‘Social and Administrative Developments in British Honduras, 1798–1843’ (unpublished thesis, University of Oxford, 1958), p. 258.Google Scholar

24 A more detailed description of the dispersal of children'in British Honduras is to be found in Sanford, Margaret, ‘Disruption of the Mother-Child Relationship in Conjunction with Matrifocality: A Study of Child-Keeping Among the Carib and Creole of British Honduras’ (Ph.D. thesis, Catholic University of America, Anthropology Studies 19, 1971).Google Scholar

25 Op. cit.

26 Op. cit.

27 Op. cit.

28 Op. cit.

29 Ibid., 129.

30 Op. cit., 380. Emphasis mine.Google Scholar

31 Op. cit., 93, n. 13.Google Scholar

32 I do not know of any historical evidence of the exact date when Caribs settled Stann Creek. Ramos may simply have chosen November 19 in 1823 as a likely date.

33 Described in detail by Coelho, Ruy, ‘The Black Carib of Honduras’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1955)Google Scholar, and by Taylor, (op. cit.) for Hopkins, in British Honduras.Google Scholar

34 Anansi, pronounced ‘hanasie’ in British Honduras, is the folk hero of the West Indies, the clever Spider who outwits his friend, Tiger, in story after story. Anansi is said to be the chief character in the folk tales of the Ashanti of West Africa, Philip Sherlock, M., West Indian Folk Tales (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

35 The punta is danced only by the Caribs in British Honduras. It is danced singly or by one or two man-woman pairs while the audience gathers closely around. The objective is to threaten attack with an imaginary phallus, not touching the partner and without losing the rhythm when dodging or attacking. The symbolism is broad, and the mock hostility expressed is the fun. The audience is very much a part of the dance, for they urge on the competitors and criticize their techniques while awaiting their own turns to show off.

36 Cf. Huizer, Gerrit, ‘“Resistance to Change,” and Radical Peasant Mobilization: Foster and Erasmus Reconsidered’, Human Organization, XXIX (Wint., 1970), pp. 303–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 The process of political integration of British Honduras has been recorded by Grant, Cedric, ‘Rural Local Government in Guyana and British Honduras’, Social and Economic Studies, XVI (1967), pp. 5776.Google Scholar

38 Op. cit., 85.Google Scholar