Navigations:
Insularity versus cosmopolitanism in the Bahamas
formality and informality in an archipelagic
nation
Nicolette Bethel
University of Cambridge
The following paper is an extract from my PhD dissertation, Navigations: the fluidity of national identity in the postcolonial Bahamas (2000). A version of this paper was presented at the BACUS[1] conference held in Nassau in June, 1998, and a revised one at the symposium Formality and Informality: managing island life held later that month in St Andrews, Scotland.
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,[2] 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.[3] In the Bahamas, ÔinformalityÕ is common. The economy rests on it; oral, not literate, communication is favoured; custom often regulates individualsÕ 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?
Formality and informality: the oral and the literate in the Bahamas
Taking as my thesis the idea that orality privileges different qualities than literacy, I argue that Bahamians, while a highly literate people, value certain traits associated with orality more highly than traits associated with literacy. In his reflections on the oral and the literate traditions, Jack Goody (1977; 1986; 1987) contends that the very act of using the Roman alphabet requires a particular type of discipline; a certain organization of thought is necessary to meet the constraints of such a linear, progressive form of communication. Because ideas must be collected, ordered, and then put down, the very act of writing — confining thought to a single word at a time — is necessarily reductive. One must choose carefully what one wishes to say (and equally what one wishes to leave out), and arrange hierarchically those thoughts which survive this selection (Goody 1977: 123). Literacy thus creates an abstraction of thought from thinker, an alienation of the product of the mind from its producer, and encourages the objectification — or formalization — of thought. Objectification in turn permits the examination and analysis of thought as thought; it allows the decontextualization of the products of the mind. Context is subsumed and writing takes on a cloak of universality, a semblance of truth, which depends for its authority on the very groundlessness of the written word.
By contrast, the act of speaking makes different demands. Speech is a shared activity, involving both speaker and listener, and it requires an audience if it is to communicate. Not surprisingly, then, orality emphasizes the communal over the individual. The contribution of any individual is invalid until it is shared with the community, for without the community, the individual is silent. Unlike writing, oral communication is immediate and transitory. One cannot recapture what has just been said once the utterance is past; thoughts must be amended as they are delivered not by removing ideas, but by adding to them. A linear progression of thought is not necessarily advantageous to a speaker, for often the ability to improvise, to interject, to think on oneÕs feet, is essential to maintaining the attention of listeners, who may easily become bored by a resolute sticking to a particular topic.[4] The immediacy of the context encourages more informal relations among people, and the transitory state of the exchange means that speech often involves far more than mere words, unlike writing, which is pure wordplay. Gestures, examples, demonstrations, actions are all part of the domain of the oral presentation. Speech is as much performance as it is content. Obviously, not even this performance may be fixed and repeatable, for each audience is different; each delivery, therefore, will conform to the demands of its listeners. Flexibility is an integral part of good speaking. In oral communication, context is everything.
Which features of orality may be fruitfully applied in the Bahamas? First, the idea that because oral communication is subjective, concrete and situated in the present, contradiction and ambiguity have little meaning. As Goody observes, ÔcontradictionÕ involves an idea of Ôspeaking againstÕ which assumes that what is said (or written) is absolute (Goody 1986: 162-3). Contextual decisions are not absolute but pragmatic. According to Goody's reading of orality and literacy, then, ambiguities, apparent paradoxes and contradictions are tolerated within oral traditions not only because the oral mode of expression is fluid, disjointed even (ÔkangarooÕ progression, in the words of one of my informants), but because in the absence of a written record contradictions and ambiguities are not always obvious.
Again, the idea that the ÔabstractÕ may be considered a preoccupation of literacy, which enshrines concepts and objects in words, and then removes those words from their setting, is a tantalizing one. In a literate tradition, ideas are normally separated from context and writing becomes an object in itself which permits, and legitimizes, abstraction. Orality, on the other hand, while not incapable of abstraction, finds no permanent function for it. What it prefers is particularism; rather than seeking broad ÔtruthsÕ which are applicable to all possible situations, orality illuminates what is special in each circumstance and focuses on the things which are particular to it. Often, in fact, when written words are introduced into oral societies, instead of representing abstractions, the opposite process happens; words become concrete objects, and, rather than enabling abstraction, serve instead as icons, to be collected, played, or divined with.
Similarly, the understanding and the function of history in an oral society depend not upon history itself, but on how it informs and affects the present. The line between ÔfactÕ and ÔfictionÕ is, not unnaturally, blurred, because what matters is not some verifiable event in the past, but what that event means for the now. This aspect is partly the result of the medium of the transmission of histories in oral societies — through bards and griots by means of performance, rather than by catalogues of facts in archives — and it is partly the outcome of a different understanding of time and place. Thus, while literate historians (and academics in general) function by reinterpreting the ÔfactsÕ (or re-examining, or overturning, the academic thought of the past — incontrovertible in itself, enshrined as it is in documents) griots function by adjusting the content of their histories to fit the present.
Bahamians, I argue, valuing rapid change far more than the preservation of any set ÔpastÕ, or the use of printed matter as icons rather than as repositories of information, emphasize the traits associated with orality (or informality) over those associated with the literate and formal. What accounts for this tendency? Although it is at first tempting to consider the Bahamian preference for oral expression as a manifestation of African origins — Africa being one of the societies most studied for its orality (Finnegan 1992 [1977]; Goody 1977), such a simplistic explanation is inadequate. Bahamian expressions of nationality are different even from the self-expressions of other Caribbean nations, who share a common African connection and whose national identities often assume literate forms.[5] In my dissertation, I address the paradox of the Bahamian situation: a fragmented literate tradition, together with a very definite sense of Bahamianness. It is my contention that fundamental to beginning to understand this fragmentation is the Bahamian archipelago itself.
Figure 1: The
Bahamian Archipelago
The archipelago: symbol of orality
Little has been written about the effect of geography on archipelagic nations — states whose borders are broader than the land on which the people live.[6] Part of the reason for this may be that such nations are not terribly common; part of it, though, is that the limits of researchersÕ paradigms preclude them from considering the question. It is common to view the nation-state as a piece of territory, usually one which is continuous with the territory of its neighbours, and separated by politically-defined borders, or else one where land and nation are roughly consonant, as is the case of many Ôisland statesÕ.
Literature about archipelagoes is often subsumed under the latter category, which tends, in ethnography, to take two main forms. On the one hand, it exhibits a set of rather romantic assumptions about islands, which range from ideas of ÔparadiseÕ[7] to ideas of absolute isolation — the tropical utopia of Gauguin or CrusoeÕs desert isle.[8] On the other, it draws heavily on writings about core-periphery relations and dependency, and views island-states as inextricably bound up in the machinations of global capital.[9] In both cases insularity is viewed as a barrier to development — on the one hand too beautiful and unspoiled to be sullied by ÔcivilizationÕ and on the other too small and weak economically to resist the pull of the sinister global economy, or indeed to profit from it.
The Bahamas does not fit comfortably into these models. The islands are neither wholly utopian nor entirely isolated. The anthropologist Susan Love Brown, who undertook fieldwork on a Bahamian island during the late 1980s, discovered that
Cat Islanders had a great love for their home island and identified themselves as being from Cat Island to the rest of the world. But, equally obvious, was their identity as Bahamians and their tendency to bring this up to me especially in the presence of someone who was not a Bahamian, such as a person of Jamaican or Haitian origin. They spoke quite plainly of going to Nassau as Ôgoing to town,Õ thus placing themselves in a rural-urban or center-periphery relationship ... Cat Islanders are conscious of the modern way of doing things. They are not isolated from the world. They come and go both from Nassau and the United States and the world. (Brown 1992: 2-3)
The Bahamian archipelago covers some 225,000 square miles (roughly 362,000 km. sq.) of one of the most strategic positions in the Atlantic Ocean, stretching from the Florida coast to the north shore of Haiti, bordered on the west by Cuba, straddling the Tropic of Cancer. Altogether there are over three thousand islands, rocks and cays, totalling approximately 5,500 square miles (8,850 km. sq.) of land. None of these is very large. The majority of them are long and thin, many only four or five miles wide at the most. Roughly thirty are inhabited and comprise about twenty distinctive administrative and social districts, few of which are limited to a single land-mass. Nassau, the capital, inhabited by an estimated 200,000 people, is found on New Providence, a mere 80 square miles (130 km. sq.) of land.
Economically, the Bahamas survives off informal activities. Its primary official industries, tourism, offshore banking and foreign investment, all bear elements which have been categorized as ÔinformalÕ in other papers in this collection. The steady movement of visitors in and out of different Bahamian islands creates a population which is constantly shifting, expanding and contracting according to season and era (see below). The twin industries of offshore banking and foreign investment depend upon a reification of the Ôinformal economyÕ, the former depending upon face-to-face transactions and a high degree of secrecy, and the latter requiring an absence of taxation — and hence of bureaucratic interference — to succeed. Moreover, its primary unofficial industry — smuggling of every kind — flourishes in the fragmented geography and fluid nature of officialdom of the Bahamas.[10]
Not surprisingly, then, many ideas about Bahamian identity have been shaped by the sense of oneself in relation to the sea.[11] It is speculated, for instance, that the name of the archipelago is taken from the Spanish baja mar (shallow sea),[12] inspired by the extensive banks and reefs that comprise Bahamian waters. These banks and reefs have played their part in shaping both the history and economy of the islands and the islandersÕ concept of themselves. In the construction of Bahamian identities, environment is fundamental.
The
Archipelago: Patterns of
Individualism and Fragmentation
The major difference between the Bahamas and the rest of the Caribbean lies in its fragmented territory, in the geography of the archipelago which renders communications among the islands difficult and made the extensive development of the plantation system — or, for that matter, of a major literate tradition — impossible. To regard Bahamian social structure as simply a variation of that of neighbouring Caribbean countries is, therefore, inadequate; while the society is similar in some respects, in others it is quite different. It is often forgotten, for instance, that in terms of sheer geographical size the Bahamas is the largest country in the region, covering roughly the same area of ocean as the whole of the Lesser Antilles; for that reason alone patterns of plantation society, social structure and development vary, sometimes significantly, from those of the rest of the West Indies.
Basing his theory on fieldwork carried out in the Bahamas during the 1970s, Alan LaFlamme makes a case for considering the archipelago state as what he terms Ôa societal subtypeÕ (LaFlamme 1983: 361). He contends that the nation consisting of many small islands is a unique model of state organization, and identifies four main attributes of the type. First, and most obvious, the archipelago state comprises many islands; as a result, inter-community contact is difficult and development uneven. Second, these islands are surrounded by what LaFlamme calls the Ôinternal seaÕ, which the inhabitants regard as national waters, and guard as jealously as other states do their territory. Third, because individual ecosystems are too small to support much more than subsistence agriculture, archipelagoes exhibit weak local and national economies. And finally, the archipelago state displays what he terms a Ôcentrifugal tendencyÕ: ÔComponent islands often possess different technoeconomic adaptations, social systems, and ideologies ... Such factors militate against strong sociocultural integration.Õ (LaFlamme 1983: 361).
A quick first look at the Bahamian situation seems to indicate the truth of his observation. Geographically, the archipelago may be divided into three, according to latitude, rainfall and the effect of trade winds and ocean currents. Economies, settlement and subsistence patterns differ throughout the archipelago, as well as history, ethnicity and social structure. For instance, the predominant pockets of white Bahamian settlement are found in the north-eastern and central islands, where there is a noticeable difference between the seasons. These islands are more densely peopled and have older systems of infrastructure than the others. Black and ÔcolouredÕ (mixed-race) populations tend to be located further south, or in specific settlements on the ÔwhiteÕ islands. Race and colour, central components of Bahamian identity, are fundamentally affected by the geography of the archipelago.
For all but the last forty years of their settlement, the only communication among the islands was effected by boat. Although the gradual institution of air travel has increased personal mobility (each settled island now boasts a commercial airstrip), inhabitants of the Bahamas are still dependent on ships for their livelihood. Very little is produced locally; almost everything is imported. The outlying islands are even more fully dependent than the capital on the sea. Most commercial airstrips outside the cities are too small to accommodate jets; moreover, they are shut down after dark, as they are not equipped with runway lights. For these islands, the main lines of communication are mailboats, motor vessels which travel between the capital and the outer islands, carrying the produce and handiwork of the islanders to the city and returning to them all manner of merchandise.
During my stay on Long Island (February-April 1995), I became very aware of this reliance on shipping for sustenance. Three vessels provided the primary contact with the ÔoutsideÕ world: a tanker which supplied gas, diesel and oil, and two mailboats. The mailboats brought cargo of every description to the island — food staples, dry goods, household appliances, lumber, cement blocks, cars, and books — as well as the mail. Of the two which served the island, the ÔupperÕ boat, the Aberlin, called at the capital in the south; the ÔlowerÕ boat, the Maya Dean, docked at two substantial settlements in the north. No major vessel stopped at DeadmanÕs Cay, the largest and most prosperous settlement on the island — and halfway between the two docks — primarily because of its shallow harbour. As a result, many of the farmers there lost much produce because it rotted before making it to market.
Early in my fieldwork, I grew more sensitive to the difficulties posed by a total reliance on the sea. At that time, several weeks of heavy weather provoked a variety of minor shortages on the island. The tanker sat offshore for several days because it was too rough to dock, and certain types of gasoline were hard to find. Fish was scarce, and crawfish, the readiest source of cash, even more so. Cash dwindled somewhat, and the people I lived with had begun to rely on barter as their main form of exchange. Not until the weather calmed and boats could dock did life return to some semblance of normalcy.
The sea, together with the boats which cross it, therefore, is crucial to issues of survival; but it is a source of division in more areas than the purely geographical. Issues of identity are rendered fluid by the islandsÕ separation from one another, despite the homogenizing efforts of the government in their bid to fashion a nation-state. Take the question of race, foremost among the qualities used to imagine the quintessential Bahamian. Predominant is the concept — current particularly in the capital — that the true Bahamian is phenotypically black.[13] Thus it is not uncommon for me, a Bahamian of mixed African, European, East Indian and Native American descent, to be approached by other Bahamians as a foreigner, despite my name (of impeccable Bahamian pedigree) and my accent (which moves back and forth between the registers of Standard English and Bahamian Dialect).
The actual composition of the Bahamian population, however, is not so cut-and-dried an affair. It is generally accepted that 85% of Bahamians are people of African descent, and the other 15% is ÔwhiteÕ. What is not so generally considered is that these ratios vary over space and time; one cannot assume, for instance, that in each island or settlement, or in each season or decade, they are the same. In a seminal study on race and politics, Colin Hughes observes Ô... within the Bahamas there have been substantial differences among the various islands and even among settlements on particular islands.Õ (Hughes 1981: 23) He illustrates these variations in a table (Table 1), which, although useful to demonstrate the geographical discontinuity of the ratios, is also temporally specific.
Table 1: Racial identification of population,
1953 (Hughes 1981: 25)
|
Electoral districts |
No. |
Black (%) |
Mixed(%) |
White (%) |
|
New Providence |
45,670 |
70.4 |
14.9 |
14.8 |
|
Andros, including Berry Is. |
7,461 |
94.7 |
4.0 |
1.3 |
|
Grand Bahama, including Bimini |
5,419 |
78.4 |
13.3 |
8.3 |
|
Abaco |
3,408 |
59.8 |
6.6 |
33.6 |
|
Harbour Island* |
1,526 |
40.1 |
3.5 |
56.4 |
|
Eleuthera* |
6,056 |
71.5 |
17.5 |
10.9 |
|
Cat Island |
3,201 |
96.9 |
2.7 |
0.4 |
|
Exuma |
2,919 |
95.9 |
2.1 |
2.0 |
|
San Salvador, including Rum Cay |
827 |
88.3 |
6.2 |
5.6 |
|
Long Island, including Ragged Island |
4,076 |
35.3 |
50.8 |
13.8 |
|
Crooked Island, including Acklins and Long Cay |
2,189 |
76.2 |
23.4 |
0.3 |
|
Inagua, including Mayaguana |
1,603 |
90.3 |
5.9 |
3.7 |
|
* The settlements of Current, Bogue, and Upper and
Lower Bluff, which comprised part of the Harbour Island Electoral district
until 1968, are here included in Eleuthera. Excludes ÔMongolianÕ and Ônot statedÕ. |
||||
Taken from the last census that included racial categories (1953), these figures are several decades out of date. Migration, internal and external, has altered the spread of the population. The past four decades have seen a vast movement of white Bahamians from island outposts to the capital and, in some cases, back again. Similarly, a massive influx of refugees from Haiti has had a major impact on the population of almost every island in the archipelago. Other immigrant groups have also changed racial ratios, particularly West Indians and Chinese, at the same time, the percentage of long-term immigrants of European descent has decreased. Tourism, which accounts for 50% of the Bahamian GDP,[14] alters considerably the ethnoscapes[15] of individual islands, creating seasonal populations of outsiders. Even these populations vary; in the cities, they are often strangers, short-term visitors whose visibility is high but whose contact with ordinary Bahamians is fleeting and mercenary. On the islands, the profile is different. Many are resident throughout the winter, or else are regular sojourners, thus integrating themselves eventually into the population, creating relationships of exchange which go beyond the purely economic. To dismiss the population of the Bahamas in purely numerical terms, then, is to oversimplify the complexities of what actually exists.
Not only do the ratios, but also the definitions of colour differ from island to island, settlement to settlement. To begin with, the number of categories of skin colour may vary, sometimes considerably; people see according to the terms they employ, and the terms themselves are diverse. What is more, the Bahamian construction of ÔraceÕ is atypical of the Caribbean region as a whole, as political colour falls into two major categories, ÔblackÕ and ÔwhiteÕ, with little mention being made of the intermediate group. Indeed, the typical Caribbean race/class pyramid[16] must be adjusted for Bahamians, for while the presence of ÔcolouredsÕ is recognized as a social or aesthetic group, their political influence cannot easily be separated from either the ÔblackÕ majority or the ÔwhiteÕ minority. The reason for this is twofold. First, the presence of native whites ensured a monopoly of political power in their hands which continued for the better part of 250 years; many of these white Bahamians, moreover, enforced a racial separation akin to that of the southern USA, whereby any ÔblackÕ ancestry was sufficient to exclude one from positions of power.[17] This distinction was further strengthened by the development of American-centred tourism during the early twentieth century, as shops, hotels, restaurants and clubs adopted admission policies exclusive of those Bahamians designated Ônon-whiteÕ. The self-constructions of these non-white Bahamians trod a similar dualistic path. Migration in search of work or education often took them to the US, and their experience in that racially segregated society, together with the discrimination they encountered at home, encouraged the identification of all but the fairest of mixed-race people as ÔblackÕ. In such a climate, the position of coloureds — in contrast to their position in the rest of the West Indies — became an infinitely manipulable, fluid one.
In certain islands, for instance, particularly those with a high proportion of native whites, the delineation between ÔwhiteÕ and ÔblackÕ is fairly rigid, and resembles that of the Southern United States in that any admixture of African blood qualifies one as ÔblackÕ; in these places coloureds are classified as ÔblacksÕ as well. In those islands where most of the inhabitants are of African descent, on the other hand, the opposite may happen: fair-skinned people may be designated ÔwhiteÕ no matter what their racial background. Where there are sizeable communities of mixed-race people, the third category is recognized; again, though, what people mean when they refer to ÔcolouredÕ, ÔbrownÕ or ÔmixedÕ people may vary from place to place. It is possible, therefore, for the same person to be considered ÔblackÕ in Freeport, ÔbrownÕ in Eleuthera or Long Island, and ÔwhiteÕ in Cat Island — and, indeed, for him to identify himself as such in each of the different places. One can never be sure that each term is always used consistently throughout the country to mean the same thing.
What is more, ethnic variations occur even within the main sub-groups (i.e. ÔwhiteÕ and ÔblackÕ) that render the situation more complex still. Bahamians recognize three main ethnic minorities: people of Mediterranean descent, primarily Greek; people of Chinese descent, and people of Haitian descent.[18] While Greeks, Syrians, Lebanese and Jews have been more or less assimilated into the ÔwhiteÕ minority, the fate of the Chinese and the Haitians has been more ambiguous. To begin with, the official status of Haitians, by and large illegal immigrants, is non-existent. Haitians and Haitian-Bahamians are segregated within Bahamian society by reasons of language, religion, and occupation; many black Bahamians regard Haitians as menial workers, fit only to be servants and gardeners. Still, the situation is not entirely simple, for in areas with a long history of Haitian settlement, Haitian-Bahamians may be accepted members of a community.[19] To illustrate: when I asked people in the village of Fox Hill to describe what it meant to belong there, some people pointed out that many young people in the area, although for all intents and purposes Bahamian, are in fact of Haitian parentage. It was recognized that it is virtually impossible to separate those Fox Hill inhabitants of Haitian descent from their Bahamian neighbours, as the Haitian presence in the area is some generations old. One informant observed: ÔYou donÕt know who is who! You think a fella walking down the street who you been dealing with for so long, are Bahamian, when you come to think of it, they actually HaitiansÕ. As for the Chinese, their status is more ambiguous still. By certain ÔblackÕ Bahamians, the Chinese are categorized as ÔwhiteÕ; however, despite their political association with whites — in terms of their business acumen and their fair skin — their acceptance into the white community is by no means assured.
LaFlammeÕs Ôcentrifugal tendencyÕ, then, appears to go beyond the economic and the socio-cultural to include issues of identity in the Bahamas. Not only do climate and culture vary from island to island, but so do ideas of skin colour and its meaning. The geographical archipelago is paralleled by a cognitive archipelago; Bahamian ÔidentityÕ is one which consists — and always has consisted — of multiple identities.
The
Archipelago: Patterns of
Interconnection and Dependency
Yet the situation is not quite so simple. It is all too easy to exaggerate the isolation of individual islands within the Bahamian archipelago. However, despite the fragmentation of territory and the heterogeneity of the Bahamian population, the inhabitants of the island chain have identified themselves as a single people, despite differences. Here again, we may turn to issues of geography for a clue.
To begin with, it must not be forgotten that this internal sea is just that — internal, an intimate part of the country. Bahamian waters are sufficiently different geographically from the ocean surrounding them to give them what may be considered a unique personality. Even before any permanent European settlement had taken place in the archipelago, the Bahamas were being described as being Ôso near to one another, as they make those seas very rough, heady and dangerousÕ.[20] Ironically, LaFlammeÕs Ôinternal seaÕ provides the unity that the individual islands lack; the one thing every island produces is expert seamen. The same men who use contrasting methods for planting and reaping on their respective properties must navigate the water in similar ways.
Any conversation with Bahamians will reveal the depth of the islandersÕ relation to the sea. Whether their contact with the ocean is as intimate as that of the boatbuilders in Mangrove Bush, Long Island, or as superficial as that of the Nassauvian who eats boiled fish on a Saturday morning, it is the one sure thing they share. Navigable only by the most experienced of sailors, the sea, with its dangers and its riches, is as important in uniting Bahamians as it is in keeping them apart.
This centrality of the sea and seafaring in the national consciousness of Bahamians may be seen in the use of certain terminology which defies international (Eurocentric) convention. Many Bahamians conceive of north as ÔdownÕ and south as ÔupÕ. This usage is particularly prevalent on Long Island, whose many settlements are connected by a single, unbranching main road, so that to go south is to go ÔupÕ and to go north is to go ÔdownÕ. When I was learning my way around the settlement where I stayed, I would confirm my destinations by asking how far along the road certain places were. One day I asked my hosts how to get to the telephone station, about a mile north of where I lived. I asked if it was Ôfifteen minutes away up the roadÕ. My hostess looked at me and exclaimed in horror: ÔNo, down the road! If you go up youÕll get lost!Õ This terminology is common usage throughout the central and southern — and even parts of the northern — Bahamas. I found this inexplicable until a sailor pointed out that for southerners to sail north — to get to Nassau, for instance — they have to sail downwind (the trades being the north-easterlies); to go south again, to get home, they must travel upwind.
It is all too easy to underestimate the interconnectedness of the individual Bahamian islands, to be overwhelmed by the divisions wrought by the sea. But the sea unites individual islands even as it separates them. For most islanders, all things official come through Nassau, and most things leave through it. This strong emphasis on the centre, even by those supposedly at its margins, is not a literate one, as literacy enables decentralization through the use of printed paper. Rather, it recalls the model of non-literate bureaucratic organization as defined by Goody:
The use of writing by the state [provides] a way of controlling spatial as well as temporal relations ... for [an oral] state ... the increase in scale, the intervention of spatial distance, the inclusion of large numbers of individuals in the organization, mean that communication between its members requires the use of intermediaries, representatives, messengers and the like. Communication is still oral and so requires the movement of persons rather than of media; but the contact between ruler and ruled is now indirect, being carried out through a hierarchy of officers ... distributed throughout the realm and by means of the intermediaries needed to transmit messages between them. (1986: 106-7)
In the Bahamas, centre-urban links are maintained primarily not by the multiplication of documents, but in the proliferation of people — administrators and the like posted to the islands from the capital. The fact that administrators are the primary representatives of the central government in the outlying islands provides the islanders with the possibility of face-to-face, informal engagement with officials. Also, the peculiarly oral contact provided by radio further strengthens informal ties. To this day, the central government uses the method of notifying islanders of important information by broadcasting its Community Announcements three times a day. Geography, then, reinforces informality in the Bahamas; even official governmental information is disseminated throughout the archipelago not in documents but by word of mouth.
A simple case study will illustrate just how central these oral communications can be to Family Island communities. The day after I arrived in Long Island in February 1995, one of the most celebrated members of the community died. The man in question was, in addition to being a nationally-recognized educator, also the patriarch of a network of influential families. His survivors were spread across the archipelago. His eldest son, a prominent clergyman, resided in Nassau, along with several others of the dead manÕs siblings, children and grandchildren. Other members of his family lived in Freeport, the second city. Still others resided in various settlements on Long Island. The old manÕs death was heralded throughout the island by the tolling of church bells, and his wife and children set about arranging the funeral. This involved the preparation and laying out of the body for public viewing; the purchasing of a suitable coffin and the arrangement of the funeral service; and, most important, the announcement of his death to the nation. While the first duties were carried out by the family on Long Island, the other details were taken over by the dead manÕs son in Nassau. According to Bahamian tradition, he placed a death notice in the papers and paid for a spot in the Community Announcements. However, the two obituaries were not alike. For financial reasons, the printed version was much longer, listing all the dead manÕs surviving relatives; the radio announcement was limited to the dead manÕs closest family.
What was not taken into consideration by the Nassau relatives was the fact that the newspapers are readily available only in the two cities. Regular bulk delivery of the dailies occurs by mailboat on the islands, and each mailboat serving Long Island stops there once a week. The old man died on a Tuesday, the day of departure of the Aberlin, and the day before the arrival of the Maya Dean; however, as the journey between Long Island and Nassau takes eighteen hours by sea, the newspapers in question would not have arrived until the following Tuesday (unless delivered by plane). Consequently, the Long Island relatives who were not mentioned in the radio announcement saw themselves as having been excluded by the son from the dead manÕs family, a grave insult. To add fuel to the fire, the family had some years before been split by religious affiliation; the dead man was born and raised Anglican, but, late in life, had converted to the evangelical denomination in which his eldest son was a minister. As luck would have it, the radio announcement consisted predominantly of the Evangelical members of the family, particularly those resident in Nassau. The slight was perceived as both a betrayal of kinship and of religion, and was further interpreted as a rejection of Long Island ÔrootsÕ, an ignoring of the local values which had made the old man great. So hurt were the excluded members of the Long Island family that they planned to boycott the funeral.
When it was discovered that the entire family had been mentioned by name in the newspaper obituary, all was forgiven, and two of the nephews who had not been mentioned over the air served as pall bearers for the coffin at the funeral. However, the son did not get off scot free; he was castigated not for slighting the Anglican/Long Island family, but for not taking into account the reality of island life. It was generally agreed that he had made a poor decision in excluding the Long Islanders from the radio announcement. However, even that was overlooked in the interest of economy; the radio announcement would have been very long, if everyone was mentioned, and it would have cost extra money to put it out.
In showing how difficult it is to sustain a national newspaper readership in the archipelago, this example demonstrates the tangential nature of the printed media to the lives of many Bahamians. The radio, and not the press, is the bearer of information, the provider of any kind of central, organized unity in the nation. Geography therefore affects not only the local conceptualization of identity in the Bahamas, but it also counteracts the potentially unifying construction of a national identity such writers as Anderson argue that the print media makes possible (1991 [1983]: 36). Even so, the print media are not absolutely irrelevant; for, as the example shows, Bahamians readily manipulate the various modes of communication available to them. ÔRealityÕ may be expressed in print, through newspapers, or on the air, over the radio; or it may be shared between the two, and all combinations are valid. The territorial fragmentation of the Bahamas encourages the development of a series of semi-independent centres whose individual needs were not easily served by any single over-arching, literate tradition.
Informality in the Bahamas, then, is a way of life. However, the informality which affects Bahamians is of quite a different sort from that which obtains in even its nearest neighbours; for in the Bahamas, everyone, including elites, is implicated. Contradictions are not only tolerated in the archipelago, but relished. Individual Bahamian islands, though independent in many ways from the centre of the archipelago, are nevertheless inextricably bound up with the fortunes of the capital.[21] Similarly, in the Bahamas, distinctions between ÔglobalÕ and ÔlocalÕ collapse; indeed, it is debatable whether the concept of ÔoutsideÕ with regard to the BahamasÕ relation with the world is useful at all. The geographical situation of the Bahamas has ensured its full involvement in the history of the Americas; the strategic and commercial position of the archipelago has created a population which is often more cosmopolitan than the Westerners who visit it. It is true that the sea cannot be easily crossed, except by those with the boats and skill. But it is equally true that with boats and skill the sea may be crossed in almost any direction one likes. Moreover, when one considers that the permanent population is one-fourteenth the size of the annual tourist arrivals, the idea of global isolation loses what little meaning it might have.
In this context, formality is precarious. The concept of isolation is not applicable to a nation of seafarers, and a conversation with any Bahamian, wherever they may be in the archipelago, will reveal that travel and freedom of movement are important parts of their national identity. In the words of one storyteller: ÔA Bahamian is a person who believes he has the inalienable right to go to Miami.Õ
How, then, do Bahamians manage this informality? If they are able to juggle ideas of insular separation and national incorporation at the same time, what tricks do they employ that make this juggling smooth? Anthony Cohen, in his discussion of individuals as autonomous members of anthropological wholes (1994) argues that most people manipulate symbols which allow them the kind of flexibility to be both individual and corporate beings. This is particularly true of the Bahamas, where the idea of individuality within connectedness is given expression in the idea of family.[22] Bahamians are quite at home with the idea of belonging to a group of islands, to separate but related entities; the entire archipelago is imagined in terms of a Ôfamily of islandsÕ. Indeed, during the period of most intense nation-building (1967-1992), the official term for the outer islands of the archipelago was the ÔFamily IslandsÕ, a name which replaced the colonial title of Out Islands.[23] The title was particularly apt; although the majority of Bahamians live in Nassau, most of them originate elsewhere in the archipelago. Many still have relatives there, and it is in the islands that their land is located — land which is held in common by all members of corporate kin groups. These island origins are used in the creation and maintenance of personal identities, as is evident in the numerous ÔhomecomingÕ celebrations, regattas, and reunions held throughout the year, both in Nassau and on the islands. Individual island traditions survive to this day more or less intact, and may vary considerably.
Any consideration of a Bahamian national identity must therefore take into account these features. The Ôinternal seaÕ of the nation fosters the development of a variety of separate but interlocking traditions which interact one with another, but which are not necessarily replicas of each other — the development, in other words, of a number of centres without margins. In large part because of the archipelagic nature of the country, it is not possible to speak with confidence of any single Bahamian identity (although, of course, such an identity is spoken of); each island has its own history, its own ethnic construction, its own particular relation with the world beyond the Bahamas. At the same time, however, despite drawing on and revelling in difference, all individual islanders conceive of, and value, the idea of being ÔBahamianÕ.