Raymond T. Smith

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After completing both parts I and II of the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos at Cambridge in 1950, and obtaining results that obliged me to consider further study, the question arose as to where I would carry out that indispensable part of anthropological research, "fieldwork." At the time most research money was available for work in Africa and I did prepare a proposal for field research among the Ibibio of Nigeria.   However, a friend of mine, Colin Rosser, had previously drawn my attention to a little known British colony on the South American continent named British Guiana. A report had recently been published by a commission investigating the possibility of resettling European Jewish populations in British Guiana and British Honduras.  The scheme was soon abandoned but the report contained a lot of useful information on social conditions, the most important of which was the racial complexity resulting from successive waves of immigration from Africa, India, China, Madeira and Britain, overlaid upon a small and dwindling native American population.  For over a decade anthropologists in Europe and in north America had been debating the phenomena known variously as culture contact, acculturation and (in a less known context) transculturation.  The leading north American proponent of acculturation studies in the Caribbean was Melville J. Herskovits of Northwestern University and it so happened that a Cambridge University lecturer in physical anthropology, Jack Trevor, had worked in the American Virgin Islands under the aegis of Herskovits and his wife.  Upon hearing of my interest in the Caribbean, Trevor put me in contact with Herskovits and urged me to apply for a Commonwealth Fellowship to study with him at Northwestern.  For various complex reasons those plans did not materialise, and on closer study I found Herskovits’s approach to the study of social change to be quite unsatisfactory.  Instead I stayed on at Cambridge for the first half of the 1949-1950 academic year and left for Jamaica in April of 1950, going directly to the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the new University College of the West Indies where I met a small group of scholars already deeply immersed in studying the problems of social transformation in the Americas.  Principal among them were Lloyd Braithwaite and Elsa Goveia—Braithwaite a sociologist and Goveia a historian—from whom I obtained a rapid deepening of my education in contemporary and historical Caribbean problems.

Thus began a long period of involvement in Caribbean research and teaching.  In the first phase of that work I carried out conventional anthropological field research that involved living for extended periods of time in small communities.  I began by choosing a village on the coastlands of British Guiana that had been founded in 1840 by newly freed slaves who had purchased an abandoned plantation.  I lived there for the better part of a year from July 1951 to June 1952.  Later in 1952 I returned to spend three months in another, smaller, "African" village on the more remote Essequibo Coast, and followed that by a similar period in a more urbanised community on the West Coast, Demerara.  More than twenty years later, in 1975, I was able to spend another four months in the first village in which I had worked in 1951-52, and these studies are described in more detail in the Hopetown pages of the Village Studies section.

In 1954 I took up an appointment as Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies and decided that if it were to be possible to understand the emerging society of British Guiana, soon to become the independent state of Guyana, I would need to become intimately familiar with the most populous "racial" group—East Indians—descendants of indentured labourers brought to work on the sugar estates after the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the Africans.  After a brief time working with similar, though much less numerous, Indian immigrants in Jamaica, I spent the whole of 1956 in the village of Windsor Forest on the West Coast Demerara, one of the largest Indian rice farming communities in the country, and with a large Muslim population to set against the various Hindu groups.  As with Hopetown, I was able to spend several months in a restudy of this community in 1975 as described in the Windsor Forest pages of the Village Studies section.  In order to broaden our understanding of the East Indian population of British Guiana, the Institute of Social and Economic Research recruited Chandra Jayawardena to work with me; he concentrated on the sugar estate population of Berbice as documented in his book, Conflict and Solidarity in a Guianese Plantation (London: The Athlone Press, 1963), and in various of our joint publications.  Chandra went on to a distinguished career in Australia where he held the post of Professor of Anthropology at MacQuarie University at the time of his premature death in 1981.

Throughout the 1950s I had taken a deep interest in the political life of British Guiana, got to know the principle players in the new nationalist politics quite well, especially Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan--each to become President of the independent Guyana--and kept comprehensive archives of materials on the unfolding drama of Guyanese politics.  When I was asked by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London to write a general book on British Guiana I readily agreed, putting the finishing touches to it after my arrival in Ghana, West Africa, where I taught at the University of Ghana from 1958 until early 1962.  Caribbean politics, and particularly the politics of race, became another field of research and some unpublished discussions of the history of the political struggle preceding independence will be found on the Guyanese Politics page.

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