Navigations: formality and informality in an archipelagic nation (Nassau, 2000)

The concept of national identity, for the researcher, suggests the presence of a state, complete with conscious, literate inventions of the self and officially created histories or metanarratives (Anderson 1991 [1983]). Yet written artifacts, together with uncontested histories, are, paradoxically, quite peripheral to the lived reality of Bahamians. That is not to say that, in a nation with a 95% literacy rate, books are not produced and consumed by the natives. Yet those books that exist reveal themselves as being so tangential to the consciousness of the average Bahamian citizen that nationalist writers consistently produce works that emphasize the difficulty of their task. In the Bahamas, ‘informality’ is common. The economy rests on it; oral, not literate, communication is favoured; custom often regulates individuals’ lives, rather than law; and the state, though central to political conceptions of the nation, is in many ways tangential to individual realities. And yet, in the face of all of this, the concept of national identity in the Bahamas remains strong. Why?

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