Anyone who has read The Two Variants ill Caribbean Race Relarions (1967) recognizes that Hany Hoetink's work is marked, perhaps above all else, by an interest in the subtleties of socially relevant distinctions. His concept of the ‘somatic nonn image', for example, is based largely on inferences about the subjective dispositions of individuals: how they perceive each other's appearance and how they idealize appearance, even if there is no clear recognition on their par! that such perceptions are ‘preclassified’ by culture. Though the concept turns uilimately on individual perceptions (for only individuals have eyes), the concept of somatic nonn image is tied to normative - that is, shared and judgmental - ideas about how people look. In culturally conventionalized terms, it is also tied to how they should look. Hoetink effectively introduces the concept as a ‘way of looking’ (the double-entendre here is intended) that is at once historically determined and historically determining. It is a subtle idea; and though it may be hard to prove, it has proved eminently persuasive. Indeed, more than thirty years after the concept was first adumbrated, no one seriously interested in understanding Caribbean ‘race’ relations can really afford to ignore it. How people are perceived, to put it crudely, is in part a matter of how they are supposed to look. If I understand him, Hoetink thinks such suppositions are historically (culturally) determined; I infer that he suspects they are not entirely conscious.
There are objections to such a formulation, particularly since social science has not yet provided a sure means by which to establish the existence of such images. But the concept remains persistently convincing to those of us who have done fieldwork, perhaps particularly in the Hispanic Caribbean. The concept of somatic norm image itself, and the ways in which Hoetink employs it, exemplify his long-standing recourse to the broad movement of historical forces in interpreting social behavior, and his healthy readiness to tolerate uncertainty in the development of theory.
Though Hoetink did not carry out work of a comparable scale on the subject of language, his views on the genesis of Caribbean creole languages, based as they are on estimates of the effects on systems of communication of differing socioracial structures, also rely heavily on factors that appear to be historically created yet socially creative.
