CHAPTER VIII

THE FAMILY SYSTEM IN THE CONTEXT OF GUIANESE SOCIETY

N the remaining section of this study we shall attempt to place the family system in a much wider setting and try to show its relation to certain factors which are not at all apparent if we restrict our field of vision to the village alone.  To this end we shall be particularly concerned with examining the position of the village in the total system of social stratification in the colony.  It is beyond the scope of this study to enter into a detailed discussion of the sociology of the whole of Guianese society, but from a methodological point of view it is unprofitable to attempt to isolate the village from the rest of the society.  The principal reason for this is that the village as such does not form anything like a self-contained system, and the family system must be viewed in its relations to other structures which are not clearly discernible within the village context.  We are fortunate in being able to draw upon a recent study of social stratification in Trinidad which gives us considerable insight into the general features of the Guianese system, since the two colonies are very similar in many respects, and we shall supplement this with our own observations (Braithwaite 1953).

THE COLOUR/CLASS SYSTEM

The population of British Guiana consists of at least five ethnic groups which are popularly supposed to be capable of distinction on the basis of physical appearance and which are ultimately referable to a ‘national’ homeland.  African Negroes, East Indians, Amerindians, Chinese and Europeans are regarded as distinct races.  There are also several other recognized ethnic groups such as the Portuguese, and various kinds of ‘mixed’ types, generally referred to as ‘Coloured’ in some contexts, but capable of more precise description in others.  Without doing too much violence to the facts, we may speak of seven main ethnically defined segments of the population; Europeans, Negroes, East Indians, Amerindians, Chinese, Portuguese, and Coloured.  It must be borne in mind that ‘Coloured’ is a term employed for a variety of purposes, and from an ethnic point of view it is merely a residual category.  There are also a few Syrians in the colony, but they are a very minor group and can be ignored.

The 1946 census of British Guiana gives the numbers and proportions of the main ethnic groups as follows:

The category ‘mixed’ includes all inter-mixtures of African and European and African and Asiatic races.  The census report makes the very interesting observation that although the ‘mixed’ group should theoretically increase more rapidly than any other, in practice it does not, but tends to remain a fairly stable proportion of the total population.  This would be explicable if one were to regard ethnic group affiliation as being predominantly a socially rather than a biologically defined phenomenon, for then we would expect an imprecisely defined group such as this to remain fairly constant since it also happens to be both a higher status group, and to some extent a functionally specialized group as well. [1]

For the purposes of the following discussion of the colour/class system it is most convenient to leave out of account the East Indian, Chinese, Amerindian and Portuguese segments for the time being and they will only be referred to for specific comment.

Plates V & VI Here

The whole system of social stratification in British Guiana, and indeed in the greater part of the British West Indies, is organized around the inter-play of two main status-determining factors.  On the one hand inherited biological characteristics, and in particular skin colour, hair formation and facial structure, are taken as criteria for the evaluation of social status, and where a combination of the three characteristics approaches a ‘European’ configuration (white skin, straight or softly waving hair, straight nose, thin lips, etc.) it is given positive or high evaluation; where the combination approaches a ‘Negro’ configuration (black skin, hard curly hair, flat nose, thick lips, etc.) it is given a negative or low evaluation.  This, of course, is placing emphasis on status ascription, and birth comes to be the point at which status is acquired along this axis of the value system. [2]   On the other hand occupational differentiation is closely correlated with status differentiation and where there is mobility through various ranked jobs in the occupational sphere there is a certain amount of mobility within the system of social stratification.  Parsons has pointed out that the functional prerequisites of a system of instrumental activities involve a differential distribution of facilities and responsibilities, and this is invariably accompanied by a differential distribution of rewards, and hence some system of social stratification (Parsons 1952: 132–6).  This means in effect, that for any social system to ‘work’ there has to be some sort of leadership or managerial functions allotted to certain individuals, and these individuals will therefore have to be given greater privileges, or wealth, or esteem.  This distribution of functions and rewards gives rise to some system of ranking in every society.  However, the system of differential distribution of rewards can be organized around various types of value orientation, but as soon as an ethnic differentiation is introduced into the system there seems to be a tendency for this line of differentiation to align itself with others.  Certainly, in the West Indies, ethnic and class distinctions do not coincide, but they are very closely correlated.  It is at the extremes of the range of ethnic variation that the ascriptive criteria of status are most marked and the least equivocal.  Thus discussions of the West Indian colour/class system tend to concentrate upon the middle of the range, where ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ become mixed both biologically and socially.  There is a very real sense in which the ‘coloured’ or racially mixed section of the population is the ‘middle-class’, vis-à-vis either the white or the black groups which are the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ classes respectively.  This is the simplest and most rudimentary way of looking at the colour/class system, and it is not difficult to see how such a system had its genesis in a slave society where miscegenation created a biologically and socially intermediate group.  One factor is of some importance here, and that is, that whereas both the ‘black’ and the ‘white’ groups display and feel a certain sense of solidarity, the intermediate coloured group does not.  It is in this intermediate group that the evaluation of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ takes on most significance and where there is the greatest anxiety over status placement, as well as the greatest factionalism and clique differentiation.  When Henriques talks of a white bias in Jamaican society one supposes that he is thinking particularly of the middle-class emphasis upon an attempt to identify with the values of the upper-class, and upper-class culture (Henriques 1953: 168).

The model of a simple three-class structure correlated with a division of the population into three ethnic groups—black, white and coloured—is clearly unrealistic from an empirical point of view, there being many highly visible cases of individuals who do not ‘fit’.  Guianese themselves vary in their description of the stratification system depending on the context in which they are speaking.  At one time they will assert that there is this differentiation into three layers based on indices of colour, and at another time they will point to certain individual Negroes who are high in the status scale as evidence of the fact that there is no exclusive racial criteria of class placement.  In other words if we were to look at the situation within the actor frame of reference as Leach does in his study of Kachin social structure we could build two ‘ideal models’ and assert that ‘reality’ lies somewhere in between (Leach 1954: 285).  On the one hand we have the model of a three-class hierarchy based on colour, and on the other we have the model of a class system based upon achieved status.  In any specific situation for the middle-class, we should probably find that status was defined by a combination of ascribed and achieved characteristics.  It would not be profitable to push the analysis too far along these lines, for the method denies the validity of establishing objective criteria of class differentiation, and it is our contention that there is an internal differentiation of Guianese society which is of great functional significance and which can only be expressed adequately in terms of an objective analysis.  This is not to deny the utility of Leach’s method, nor to imply that there is a rigidity in the ‘real’ situation which corresponds with the abstractions we use to describe the forces which are at work in that situation.  From the actor’s point of view there are two polar values of status distinction which we may term ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’, and the evaluations of these polarities are shared to some extent by all Guianese.  This is a conceptualization of status differentiation which cuts across the whole of Guianese society, and no matter how concerned we are in depicting the ‘actual’ situation, it is necessary to isolate this shared value for analytical purposes.  This is what Braithwaite refers to as the ‘ascriptive base’ of Trinidadian society, but in attempting to demonstrate the objective division of Trinidad society into three classes and show precisely how this is correlated with ethnic divisions, he neglects the implications of the ‘black’–‘white’ polarity, and of the inevitable and even necessary ambiguity inhering in the ‘actual’ situation (Braithwaite 1953: 46–63).

Hierarchical ranking at all levels of Guianese society is to some extent in terms of the black-white dichotomy.  At the extreme ends of the scale there is a consolidation around the polar definitions so that it is possible to refer to the ‘white group’ and to the ‘Negro group’.  Both groups are aware of their identity as differentiated elements in Guianese society, and both are sharply separated off from each other, and from the ‘coloured middle-class’.  We must stress at this point, the fact that the concepts, ‘black’ and ‘white’ are social concepts and correspond not to biological phenomena but to social facts.  Blackness and whiteness are symbolized by different cultural complexes, of which we would rate language, marriage customs and dress as the most important elements.  This means that there can be a disparity between an individual’s physical characteristics and his class affiliation, and the possibility of acquiring culture means that there is the possibility of limited mobility within the system.  However, mobility is also dependent upon movement in the occupational sphere, and this means that there is another important correlate of cultural differentiation.

Since the white group is the apex of the social pyramid and extremely close to the cluster of positively evaluated elements (many of which really lie outside the colony in the metropolitan centre, as Braithwaite has pointed out) it forms the most isolated and internally solidary sub-group.  Numerically small, and culturally homogeneous (at least within the colony, although its members may come from widely differing backgrounds, and of course it has its own system of distinctions largely referable to the class system of Britain) its members participate almost solely at the executive, managerial and administrative levels of the occupational structure.  There is virtually no inter-marriage with other groups and it preserves its social distinction vis-à-vis the rest of the population by means of an intricate, and usually covert mythology of racial purity and superiority.  But it is equally true that the black group retains a good deal of social solidarity, not so much as a large cohesive group extending all over the colony as in small territorial clusters, such as our three villages.  Once again this solidarity is maintained by an elaborate mythology, this time of inferiority.  In both cases there is emphasis placed on conformity to the standards of the group and this is the crucial element from our point of view.

We may summarize the above rather discursive and inadequate discussion by saying that there is a shared scale of colour-values couched in terms of a polar distinction of black and white, and that it is around the polar distinctions that real social classes crystallize.  These social classes form functionally differentiated groups within the total social system, and they each have a distinct sub-culture, whilst sharing common cultural elements corresponding to their unity as a total social system.  We shall not attempt to analyse the position of the middle-class since it does not directly concern us here, but we would be very sceptical of representing this entity as a cohesive social group in the same way as we would represent the white and black.  Nor would we stress the existence of a pan-Guiana black group, but would rather tend to see the situation in terms of a series of local communities each with its own internal solidarity as a separate group.  These communities may themselves be culturally differentiated one from another and in the urban areas the number of sub-groups may be very great indeed.  What enables us to visualize the socially black group as a group, is the fact that it is functionally and culturally differentiated in the total social system; a fact which is clearly visible in the economic occupational system.

We may now turn to an examination of this internal functional differentiation of the total system, and this requires at least a cursory examination of the economic reference points of the system.  There can be no doubt that the economy of the coastlands is organized around the plantation cultivation of sugar and it is this sector of the economy which has had the longest historical continuity.  Bauxite mining and rice cultivation have developed as the other main sectors.  Imports of manufactured consumer goods, and food, are balanced against exports of sugar, bauxite and rice, and these economic exchanges across the boundary of the system are essential to the maintenance of internal economic balance, and result in it being extremely sensitive to fluctuation in world markets.  The proper functioning of the economy depends upon its internal organization as well as on its external exchanges, and administrative control and responsibility is, in the main, concentrated in the hands of the ‘European’ group.  This is most obviously true in the case of the sugar industry which generally recruits its managerial class from Britain.  The bauxite industry is controlled by American and Canadian interests, and its higher administrative, executive, and technical staff is recruited outside the colony.  The rice industry is less obviously controlled by Europeans but its main marketing organization is sponsored by the government and the large development schemes for the industry are to be carried out under the aegis of a Development Corporation financed to a large extent by British capital and administered by a high-level staff of upper-class executives.  The director of this Corporation is a light coloured Guianese of exceptional ability who is almost completely identified with the white group, despite being technically a coloured Guianese.  Negroes provide a good deal of the labour for the bauxite industry, and for the sugar estates, particularly during the cane-cutting season, and they also produce a certain amount of rice on a small scale, which is fed into the rice industry.  At the bauxite mines they are employed principally in the lower grades as unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled workers, but there is undoubtedly a wider range of possibility of rising in the occupational scale in this industry, because of the greater job differentiation in a highly mechanized enterprise.  In the sugar industry the bulk of Negro workers are field labourers, but there are a few highly skilled technical jobs, such as that of sugar-boiler, in which the Negroes have a virtual monopoly.  In the rice industry it is broadly true to say that Negroes only come into the picture as small-scale growers, and they have not participated in the increasing mechanization of cultivation, nor do they own or operate mills or large plantations.  It is the East Indians who are the most forceful element and who use the industry as a means of accumulating wealth, and establishing higher status for themselves within their own community.

Apart from these three industries where the Negro’s role is that of a relatively low status wage-earner, there is a whole range of business organization concerned with the import/export trade, internal distribution of consumer goods, banking, insurance, etc., where Negro participation is practically non-existent.  In the higher levels of this organization, European dominance is evident since most of the big firms and the banks are controlled by British, Canadian or American companies.  However, there are many businesses owned and controlled by Portuguese, Chinese and Indians, and in the country districts the retail businesses are almost exclusively run by members of these three groups.

The complex system of marketing and exchange whereby farm produce of one kind and another is distributed, requires no over-all organization or differentiation of occupational roles.  Amongst Negroes it is almost exclusively women who participate in the marketing process, and some women are extremely industrious as ‘hucksters’, or agents, working between the grower and the seller.  However, this function is as often fulfilled by East Indians as it is by Negro women.

In our grossly over-simplified picture of the economic reference points of the system, positions of effective over-all control tend to be occupied by the members of the highest status group, whilst the middle range of functions such as office jobs in businesses concerned with administering the economy, are filled by Coloured persons, Chinese and Portuguese.  Chinese, Portuguese and Indians operate independent businesses which are not involved in large-scale control activities and which can be run with a minimum of internal organization.  Negroes only come into the picture at the lowest level where they work as wage labourers, selling their labour where and when they can, and being wholly unconcerned with the accumulation and control of capital.  (Apart from village land and houses.)

It is in the field of the professions, and in the bureaucracy that Negroes come to occupy high status positions.  In professions such as medicine, law, teaching, and nursing there is a tendency for Negroes and Coloured persons to predominate, but in law and medicine one finds representatives of all the racial groups.  (Except Amerindians of course.)  Law and medicine are both professional occupations with peculiar characteristics.  To begin with they require a long period of education which usually involves a close contact with the culture of the European group and hence they carry high prestige on that account as well as on account of their intrinsic nature as personal services.  Also, they are not occupations in an organization with a hierarchy of control, and there is therefore no conflict involved.  It is interesting to note that where an organization does exist, as in the case of the Public Hospital, then top executive control is generally vested in the hands of a European or a very light coloured doctor.

In the bureaucratic machine of the Colonial Government it is quite clear that the open policy of recruitment and promotion on the basis of merit can only work properly when there is some uniformity in the motivations of employees, regardless of race.  The fact is that the majority of the top-ranking posts are filled by Englishmen or by white Guianese, or light coloured persons, and this fact cannot be wholly attributed to the Machiavellian designs of the European group who are plotting to exclude any non-European from any position of power.  It is quite clearly one of the major functions of the bureaucracy to safeguard the integration and stability of the social system.  It has therefore to assign positions of control and power to those who are prepared to do this.  But it is equally true to say that it is extremely difficult for a person who has many of the physical characteristics of the group most lowly evaluated on the colour scale to assume such a position of control.  It must be borne in mind that the scale of colour values is shared by all the groups comprising Guianese society, whether they consciously and logically subscribe to it or not.  This means that the Negro official is positively denigrated by his own race, and one of the most frequently heard remarks amongst Negro villagers is to the effect that it will be a bad day for British Guiana is ever the colony is ‘ruled’ by a Negro Governor.  Under these circumstances it is not difficult to see why the majority of upwardly mobile Negro civil servants, or politicians for that matter, should be either negatively motivated to aspiring to the highest controlling positions, or aspire only under the impetus of an emotional opposition to the European group.  During the recent short period when the People’s Progressive Party held power it was striking that the leaders sought to retain their identity with the ‘masses’ by pursuing a vigorous campaign of opposition to the European group.  The whole function of the bureaucracy was transformed from one of system integration, to one of open conflict and the swift action taken against an alleged ‘communist’ plot was one way of preserving the bureaucracy from a threatened disorganization, and restoring the values on which stability and integration rest.  The very fact that ‘reform’ came to be couched in terms of a vigorous denial of the legitimacy of the position of the Europeans is an indication that colour values predominated, and that this was merely an inverted application of them.  The problem is much more complex than this of course, for the leaders of the P.P.P.  were seeking a legitimatization of their position on completely different grounds to that of the existing authority system and in this sense the whole movement was a truly revolutionary one.  Of course this is only one aspect of the complex of factors involved in any self-government movements in British Guiana, and we have not even attempted to analyse the full working of the political system or/ its historical background.  Our object at the moment is merely to discuss the way in which functional differentiation of the social system is related to the system of social stratification, and we had got as far as saying that the conflicts involved in acceptance of the colour/ class hierarchy, combined with the acceptance of a degree of upward mobility for the members of the Negro group, tends to be resolved by such members accepting statuses which are highly valued but do not involve participation in high-level control of either the economy or the bureaucracy.  This is of course not true of all Negroes and there are many cases of persons who are able to adjust to the situation and who successfully hold positions of responsibility in the government.

The church as a social organization has never seriously laid claim to any real political control, and religion has tended to be organized upon sectarian lines with no dominant organization.  The Anglican Church is the ‘official church’ but it has no monopoly of control or of state support.  On the whole the churches have never come into serious conflict with the government (apart from one or two minor episodes prior to 1836), and they have resolved any conflict between christian doctrine and social practice by projecting the Kingdom of Heaven into the future. [3]   There is some contrast with the position of the Roman Catholic church in some Latin American countries where the church seems to act as the focus of stable political structure, thus enabling rapid changes of government to take place without fatally disrupting the over-all system of political control.

If our rough analysis of the correspondence between the system of social stratification and the functional differentiation of the system is correct, it follows that the Negroes, considered as a group, occupy low status, and that where mobility is possible it tends to be channelled in very definite directions which are away from control functions and towards a concentration on the maintenance of the ascriptively based hierarchical system.  Paradoxical as this may seem there is a sense in which every Negro who has achieved high social status, is taken to be the exception that proves the rule.  Upwardly mobile Negroes tend to validate their new status by ensuring that their children will fit the position by ascriptive criteria, and this is possible by seeking a lighter coloured spouse.

Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians all came to British Guiana after the foundations of the colour-class system had been laid, and all are in a sense marginal to it.  Originally brought in to replace the Negroes as estate labourers, the Portuguese and Chinese were able to take over economic functions particularly in the field of distribution, which, if entered by Negroes, would have necessitated a reorganization of the social structure to allow for a differentiation of the Negro group on the basis of some individuals having control over comparatively large economic resources.  Although the East Indians were always regarded as the lowest status group in the whole community, they never fitted completely into the ascriptive status hierarchy based on colour.  Owing to the fact that they could maintain a certain degree of social separation, and at the same time retain a system of stratification within their own group, they have tended to be assimilated into the total social system at all levels of differentiation, with the possible exception of the top control positions.  Whilst the majority of Indians are still estate labourers, there is a significant minority who are assuming control of land, business enterprises, and political organizations.  For the purposes of this study we need only treat the fact that they appear at all levels of the social hierarchy, and that their fluidity in relation to the colour scale has on the whole enabled them to stress achievement criteria more than the Negroes have been able to do.

We must finally say a word about the differential ranking of local communities.  Our study is not concerned with an analysis of the urban centres, but there is clearly a difference between a highly differentiated urban centre and a small rural community.  In the urban centre all levels of the hierarchical ranking are represented, and territorial contiguity coupled with more intensive social interaction means that the cultural norms of all groups represented within the city tend to converge to some extent.  Although relative positions in the status hierarchy may be maintained there is a greater range of occupations open even within the Negro type occupational band, and there is therefore a larger proportion of Negroes who approximate to middle-class cultural standards.  At the same time the city produces its own extremely low status groups concentrated in localized communities where different sub-cultures tend to develop.  There is also a very noticeable tendency for the difficulty involved in keeping the various sub-groups isolated to result in the development of a system of sanctions against ‘deviance’.  What is often referred to as ‘anomie’ or anomic tendencies, begins to appear when the sub-groups with their subcultures are drawn together in an urban situation.  Juvenile delinquency, crime and drunkenness appear, and mechanisms of social control relative to the primary social system are brought into play.  Each sub-group retains its own mechanisms of social control which are extra-legal in terms of the institutionalized control system of police, courts etc.  Thus obeah continues to flourish in the city, and in the upper-class group social sanctions peculiar to itself are prevalent.  The repatriation of persons who do not conform to the standards of the European group is one of the most obvious.

Outside the urban areas there is some ranking of the rural communities, but it would be extremely difficult to draw up a scale of relative positions such as that given by Braithwaite for Trinidad (Braithwaite 1953: 40–41).  So much depends on the reference point from which the scale is drawn, and it is doubtful whether there would be over-all agreement on such ranking in British Guiana.  The ethnic, class and cultural characteristics of a rural community determine its rank order in accordance with the general value system.  The nearer the community is to Georgetown or a large sugar estate, the more likely it is to have a diverse ethnic and class structure and the less culturally differentiated it is likely to be from other communities in the same area.  This is a very loose statement and cannot be taken to imply any scale such as that posited by Redfield for Yucatan (Redfield 1941).

It is within this framework of the colour/class system that we have to view the internal differentiation of the villages, and it would seem that the most important features to bear in mind are the countervailing tendencies of the values which stress status placement on the basis of achieved criteria and those which stress ascribed status on the basis of ‘race’ or biological characteristics.  These are not the only values involved for there are such differential factors as whether an individual is town or country born, but they are the paramount ones.

The argument we have presented so far can be further elucidated by reference to Durkheim’s distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’ solidarity. [4]   In the case of British Guiana we could take it that we have a state of affairs where both organic and mechanical solidarity co-exist.  The hereditary factors of ‘race’ are used as a basis for ascribing functions within the social system, but at the same time there is quite clearly a sense in which this process can no longer operate adequately and specialization of function has to break away from the hereditary base, and competence in performing the functions must be taken into account.  Historically, the segments which go to make up the total population of the colony were brought together almost solely on the basis of their respective functions in the economy; the economy of plantation cultivation.  As this economy breaks down or becomes more diversified, the number of functions increases, and although there is the tendency for special ethnic groups to appropriate special functions, such as the Portuguese domination of the retail trade, so long as the social system continues to become more differentiated and evidences an increasing division of labour, so the ethnic basis of specialization begins to disappear

It is clear from the evidence presented here that the process of specialization of functions has not become completely divorced from an hereditary ethnic basis by any means, and one of the most noticeable features of our village populations is their relative uniformity of function in the occupational system of the total social system.  This is a matter of degree of course, and we must now take up the question of just how much, and in what way, the village populations are themselves differentiated internally.

THE LOCAL COMMUNITY AND INTERNAL DIFFERENTIATION

All three villages, August Town, Perseverance and Better Hope constitute well defined local communities with a very definite   sense of unity and distinction from other communities, which is partly related to their distinction as territorial entities, but is much more far-reaching than this.  In discussing the stratification of the total social system we pointed out that apart from the criteria of ethnic ascription and occupational achievement, other value judgements enter into the picture, such as place of residence and the distinction between rural and urban dwellers, and all these factors combine to place the majority of our village inhabitants at the very bottom of the status scale.  However, this is a macroscopic view, and we shall now examine each village more closely, using our general description of the over-all system as a back-cloth against which to place all the various elements.  We shall deal with August Town first, and in greatest detail.

August Town

August Town expresses its corporate identity in two forms which we take to be of the greatest significance.  It regards itself as a black people’s village’ and as being ‘all one family’.

Neither of these statements is literally true, but they are both made frequently, without any reservations whatsoever.  There is no other recognized symbol of village unity, with the possible exception of the village council, but this latter is much more a poorly developed political institution than a cultural symbol which is meaningful to all the villagers.  The church and the school are both village institutions (the Congregational church and school particularly), but membership is divided between two churches and two schools, and we find no development either in church offices or in local saints or deities that would lead us to regard these bodies as symbols of local solidarity.  It is precisely because the churches only function as associational groupings within the social system of the local community that it is possible for there to be no development of them as symbols of local solidarity, and we shall see that they are much more related in a symbolic way to social units wider than the village group.  Occasional inter-village cricket matches are played by the schools against other schools on the coast, and there is an annual schools sports day on which August Town schools compete against all the other schools on the coast, but as two separate schools and not as a village team.  In the Congregational church there are occasional ‘rallies of the tribes’, when each church of the Congregational body competes with the others to see how much money they can raise for their own particular church (see Kirke 1898: 42–4).  There is a little ceremony in which each church team brings up its total collection to the platform and the amount is announced.  The church with the largest collection is the ‘winner’.  These expressions of inter-village rivalry are much more concerned with rivalry between special interest groups from each village.

The village council is poorly developed as a representative institution, and one could not regard it as a symbol of village unity except in a very rudimentary way.  It meets to review rate collection and discuss matters almost solely concerned with drainage and irrigation, the protection of village lands from stray animals, and the proper management of village lands.  Representations to the central government on any matter are much more likely to be made through a local member of the Legislative Assembly, than through the Village Chairman acting in his capacity as Village Chairman.  Council meetings are not attended by members of the public, who show very little interest in the actual activities of the council as such.

The ‘wake’ which is held on the death of any member of the village (with certain exceptions discussed below), is an important ritual with a great deal of significance to the present discussion.  The wake serves as an expression of local solidarity whatever other functions it may have, and the ideal thing is for every household to be represented at every wake by at least one of its members.  Even if families are not on speaking terms they will forget their differences when there is a death, and probably attend each other’s wakes.  It is even more obligatory to attend if the dead person is ‘family’ to you, but still the wake is open to anyone, and it is a village as well as a family affair.  In this respect it seems important to ask who does not attend rather than who does attend, and immediately we ask this question we get some quite interesting answers.  The majority of school-teachers do not attend wakes regularly unless the dead person was a particularly prominent villager or a relative of theirs.  Even if they do attend they stay on the periphery of the crowd and would hardly go inside the house.  The few East Indians in the village, the Portuguese storekeeper, a Chinese shopkeeper, and a mixed Portuguese-Negro shop-keeper do not normally attend wakes, nor do a few other non-Negroes in the village.  When a Negro Roman Catholic in the village died, the Portuguese store-keeper, who is the leading Catholic in the village, persuaded the dead woman’s husband that he should not keep a wake.  A few people did gather at the house, but there was no hymn singing and very little drinking.  We find then, that the wake is a good index to the group which considers itself to be of the village in the real sense.  The fact that I attended every wake held during my stay in August Town was remembered long after I left the village and was regarded as a good sign of the degree to which I had identified myself with the village as a whole.  The wake serves to relate the individual both to his family and kinship group and to the village community, and the ritual itself expresses these relationships.

Now let us return to the statement ‘this is a black people’s village’ The sense of all being black is a mechanism of solidarity in certain ways, and for ‘blackness’, as a shared physical attribute having a definite status value in the social system of British Guiana as a whole, to be tied to the local concept of ‘village’, makes it even more important.  What interests us for the moment though is the ‘blackness’ part of the formula, and we can consider it in relation to another regularly repeated phrase ‘we black people can never progress; we don’t trust each other and we don’t work together’.  In this context ‘blackness’ is used as a relative concept to distinguish the members of the village from Indians, Chinese, Portuguese and Europeans, and it implies a relative position in a hierarchy of colour values, and a relative position in a multi-racial society.  This relative position is nearly always expressed in terms which show its distance from the white group.  Anyone who doesn’t conform to the local customs is ‘playing white people’ or ‘playing great’.  To be born in the village community is to be ascribed status as a member of a black people’s village’ as well as of a particular family group.  The accent upon not being able to ‘progress’ is really symbolic of the social distance which must exist between the various social strata for the system to continue in its present form.

Social stratification in the village is largely in terms of cultural differences combined with occupational status; the school-teacher group, with one or two government employees, forming the village ‘upper-class’.  The school-teachers even if they are born in the village and work their way through the stage of being a pupil teacher, soon begin to feel themselves different from other people and usually break away from their families and set up a separate household.  There were one or two persons in the village who had been pupil teachers and had never been confirmed in their appointments.  In one such case the person was still occasionally referred to as ‘teach’ but he had quite definitely been completely assimilated into the village as a whole, rather than into the teacher group.  An old retired school-teacher living in the village would always be referred to as ‘teach’, and he mixed very little in the village affairs, but was not included in the present day teacher clique.  On the other hand a retired head-teacher who remained prominent in political affairs would always be included if he were in the village.  The hall-mark of the school-teacher is that he wears a jacket and a tie almost all the time, except when he is relaxing at home, and he speaks a more ‘grammatical’ form of English than the local dialect.  Above all these are the symbols of his status, but of course they are not the only ones, and a person who merely speaks ‘grammatical’ English and wears a coat and tie does not thereby automatically qualify for higher status group membership.  The school-teacher approximates more closely than anyone else in the village to the ‘white’ standards of behaviour, and he is also a specialist in passing on the values of the total social system.  Both the church and the school have this function, and the school-teachers are active in both organizations.  Women teachers are in a somewhat different position as might be expected in view of the different roles of women in the social system.  Unless a teacher of the female sex is married to a male teacher she is unlikely to become a member of the teacher clique, though she will quite definitely mark herself off in some way from the other women in the village.  One way in which she does this is by not having children and not marrying, which may of course be only a by-product f the fact that she is unable to find a partner who will satisfy her desire for prestige, coupled with the fact that she is relatively financially independent.  Women teachers play an important part in some of the associational groups such as church groups, youth clubs and women’s clubs.

(The Business group)

The important thing about social stratification in the village is that it is not based on wealth qua wealth.  Although the teacher group, and the other few persons who come into the socially superior position of the teacher group, enjoy a steady income and are therefore more economically secure on the whole, they are by no means the wealthiest persons in the village.  Most of the wealthy persons are not black, and they are predominantly shopkeepers.  The biggest shops and the store are owned by mixed Negro-Chinese; Portuguese, mixed Negro-Portuguese, and mixed Negro-White persons.  Some of the largest shopkeepers also own the largest amounts of land.  The few Negroes who run shops in the village only run very small cake-shops selling cake, bread, soft drinks and sweets, and the weekly turnovers of these businesses are very small, profits rarely exceeding about ten dollars per week, and usually considerably less.  The shops and the ethnic classification of their owners are shown below.

Type of shop                                             Race of Owner

Store—selling cloth, manu-                 Portuguese

factured clothing, shoes,

farm implements, etc.

Store—as above                                      East Indian

Rum shop and grocery                          Negro-Chinese

Rum shop and grocery                          Negro-Chinese

Grocery                                                     Negro-Chinese

Grocery                                                     Negro-Portuguese

Grocery                                                     Negro-Chinese

Butcher                                                     Negro-Portuguese

Cakeshop                                                  Chinese

Cakeshop                                                  Coloured │ Persons of indeterminate

Cakeshop                                                  Coloured │ Negro-white and

Cakeshop                                                  Coloured │ Negro-Portuguese

Cakeshop                                                  Coloured │ descent

Cakeshop                                                   Negro

Cakeshop                                                   Negro

Cakeshop                                                   Negro

Cakeshop                                                   Negro

Cycle-repair shop                                     Negro-Portuguese

Tailor                                                          Negro-Portuguese

It would appear that there is a very positive correlation between economic success and differentiation on the basis of racial distinction, or at least differentiation in terms of skin colour.  The people who go into business and are successful, and who accumulate wealth, are marginal to the concept of village solidarity in terms of ‘blackness’.  A constant complaint is that if you are black, other people in the village don’t like to see you doing well financially.  In the market held early on Monday mornings in the village most of the persons selling are East Indians, and when it comes to disposing of fowls or small livestock, villagers will normally sell them to an Indian rather than to a fellow villager who is a huckster.  In other words there appears to be a positive suppression of internal differentiation on the basis of wealth or economic achievement.  Achievement for a Negro is in terms of occupational status, and for all advancement to higher status than that of village school-teacher the individual has to leave the village and usually cuts himself, or herself, off quite effectively from the village group.

In many respects the development of internal differentiation on the basis of wealth would be in conflict with the position of the village as a ‘black people’s village’ within the larger framework of the colour/class system of the country as a whole.  The major ascription of status in the total social system on the basis of skin colour means that the whole village shares this status, and internal differentiation on the basis of wealth alone would mean that there would be the possibility of considerable mobility on the basis of criteria which conflict with ascriptive status.  In many ways the little mobility that does exist depends upon approximating to the colour group above you by taking on some of the cultural symbols connected with the very highest group in the whole system, the Europeans.  Local solidarity is extremely dependent upon colour values, and since values of economic achievement would clash with these they tend to be suppressed by the community as a whole.  To spend money has much more social approval than to accumulate money, and giving lavish parties is a common practice.

Whilst the successful shopkeepers are marginal to the main section of the village in terms of skin colour, they are not sharply differentiated from it in terms of hierarchical status.  The majority of them have kinship ties with Negro villagers and they share the same speech patterns, often live in common-law unions, and do not necessarily spend money on items of display furnishings for their houses.  Some do of course, and the wealthier ones may send their children to be educated in Georgetown.

(The higher status élite)

At the time of the study there was a clearly distinguishable élite in August Town, the members of which considered themselves to be superior to the rest of the village population, and who occupied positions which gave them some measure of control over the actions of other villagers.  Its members were drawn together on the basis of the positions they held in the occupational system, or on the basis of their being light coloured.  With the exception of the village chairman who was born in August Town, and was for many years head teacher of one of the schools, all were ‘strangers’ to the village with no kinship ties to any of the ordinary villagers.  The group had no internal organization but was drawn together on the basis of its distinction from the rest of the village, and its focus of association was in party giving and bridge playing.  The parties were occasions for status display and lavish consumption (relative to the incomes of the participants), and emphasis would be placed upon the ‘right’ way of doing things.  The District Medical Officer, the District Commissioner, the Public Works overseer and the Police Inspector who all lived at Fort Nelson about one mile away, would be drawn into the round of social gatherings and party giving, because of their high status as government officials, and at the other end of the scale one family, the head of which was a truck driver but who owned a car (and also had living with him a very light coloured relative who was a school-teacher), would be drawn in on some occasions.  One of the Portuguese store-keepers achieved membership of this élite, but only on account of his and his wife’s Georgetown connexions, and his membership of certain middle-class clubs in the city.

(The school-teacher clique)

The younger subordinate school-teachers formed a separate clique on their own.  Many of them belonged to the village and had kinship ties within it, but they tended to mix with each other more than with anyone else, and they exercised leadership in practically all the church organizations and clubs.  They were very conscious of their desire to ‘improve’ themselves and the village, and would be the most active members of any organization that started to initiate reform of any kind.  Whilst their sincerity cannot be doubted, it must also be recognized that part of the motivation involved is to establish their own status as being both different from, and above, that which they desire to change.  Countless movements aimed at improvement and ‘moral uplift’ have been initiated in August Town, but most of them have merely died a natural death without effecting any appreciable change in the structure of the village, or its moral system.  They have, however, been important in providing a means of allowing persons who are changing their status to demonstrate their rôles, and their assimilation of different cultural standards, and they also serve to emphasize the differentiation of the minority from the mass, and thus preserve the status structure of the whole community.

The main status group differentiation within the village is schematically represented below, but it must be remembered that this is an abstract positional diagram and does not show the various empirical points of overlap due to individual participation in more than one group.

The reason why the village élite group does not harden into a hereditary village upper-class group, is that once persons have attained a position which would entitle them to be included in this group, they usually move out of the village.  Even if they themselves do not leave, it is more than likely that their children will be sent to High School in Georgetown from where they may enter the civil service or the teaching or nursing professions without ever returning to the village.  There is thus a regular turnover of the members of the village upper-class group, because most of them are ‘strangers’, and the few persons from the village who achieve higher status generally go off to other villages, or to Georgetown.

 (Differentiation within the main village group)

The whole tenor of our argument so far has been to the effect that the main village group is a homogeneous [5] and relatively undifferentiated unit, but of course this is only true within the frame of reference we adopted, which directed our attention to the major status differences both within the village and within the colony as a whole.  The main village group forms a localized sub-system of the total social system, but it is itself differentiated internally without however producing any significant social stratification within itself.  The ‘band’ of status differentiations within this group is narrow and non-institutionalized, and in fact the main pressures are operating to prevent its becoming wider, or in other words to prevent significant status differences from developing beyond a point which would destroy the solidarity of the group, and conflict with the major values of the total system.  This does not mean that persons within the group do not aspire to be respected by their fellows or that there are no standards of value-judgement concerning behaviour; of course there are, and they are quite definitely enforced.  Clearly the members of this group must share the values of the total social system, and they must recognize the superiority of those in superordinate positions for the social system to operate at all.  It is significant that within the group a common opprobrious term is ‘lawless’ or ‘unruly’, and by implication it means that the person using the term considers that he conforms more closely to the pattern of ‘respectable’ behaviour embodied in the norms of the whole society.  It is in fact in terms of these values that persons seek to validate their own sense of superiority within the main village group.  Their failure conclusively to establish such superiority is always because they are ‘black people’, and of the village.  Some persons are regular church-goers, good at making speeches, prosper financially or have steady jobs, and so on, and this entitles them to the respect of their fellow villagers provided they don’t try to break the conventions of the group by ‘playing great’ or ‘playing white people’.  If they do, then they will be ridiculed and gossiped about and given a bad name.  On the other hand some persons will fall below the standards of the group and the same sanctions will operate to prevent them continuing to do so.  They may even have to leave the village if they are ‘shamed’ too much.  It is of the utmost importance to note than even within the main Negro village group the term ‘nigger man’ is used as a term of abuse and there is the tendency to see beauty in a straight nose, a skin a shade lighter, or hair which is less ‘kinky’ or ‘hard’.  Mothers even pull their children’s noses to make them longer.  The negative evaluation of Negro characteristics operates even within the lowest status Negro group.

There are certain aspects of non-hierarchical differentiation which it is important to touch upon at this point.  We described earlier the division of August Town into two primary territorial sections: Troy section on the one hand, and St. Paul’s plus Belle Vue, on the other.  The real division with a historical background, is between Troy and St. Paul’s, and there is a definite myth (which may or may not correspond to historical fact) concerning the hostility which existed between the two sections (see Chapter I).  At the present time the distinction between the two sections is over-ridden by the primary membership of the village as a whole, but there are still numerous occasions on which persons refer to their membership of one or the other section, and whilst the primary criterion of membership is actual residence, it may be that a person who was born in Troy and now 1ives in St. Paul’s may claim to be a Troy person.  The distinction of belonging to one or the other section usually arises in situations of rivalry, hostility or antagonism, and each group characterizes the other in a derogatory way.  Thus St. Paul’s people are said to be secretive and un-co-operative, and it is said that if the members of one household heard a murder being committed in the next house they would close up their windows and keep quiet, rather than go and see what was happening.  There is also a persistent rumour amongst Troy people that the members of St. Paul’s section have a secret society at which they plan all kinds of nefarious activities.  Troy people, on the other hand, are characterized as lawless and unruly, as great gossipers, and as people who are always ready to quarrel.  In point of fact there is no distinguishable difference between the behaviour of the members of the two sections, and the sectional opposition is rarely expressed in any concerted form.  There is always a certain amount of suspicion as to whether one or the other section is having an unfair proportion of village revenue spent on its drainage and irrigation works, and there is often difficulty in getting men from one section to carry out work on the dams and trenches of the other.  Intersection rivalry in sports is reputed to occur, but this was never observed.  Belle Vue is sometimes aligned with St. Paul’s in this context, but there is a clear tendency for it to be regarded as a distinct and relatively neutral unit, a tendency reinforced by the fact that it has a number of households which are marginal to the village proper in that their members are East Indians, Coloured, or ‘strangers’ to the village.  Most of these households are scattered throughout Belle Vue, generally away from the Public Road and they make Belle Vue into something of a ‘fringe’ area.  (See map 3 at end of book.)

Both Troy and St. Paul’s are further subdivided into two sections by the Public Road, but this division is more significant in Troy than in St. Paul’s, probably because Troy has a larger population.  The two sections of Troy are referred to as ‘back-dam’ and ‘waterside’, or ‘back-dam’ and ‘sand-top’, and whilst there is no tradition of mutual hostility between the two they tend to become separate neighbourhoods.  Thus there will be more reciprocal visits between neighbours and kin within one section than between sections.

It is not surprising that these territorial distinctions should develop, and if one pushed the breakdown even further one could distinguish even smaller territorial nuclei of more intensive neighbourhood sentiments arising from the slightly greater frequency of interaction between households living close together.  However, the extension of kinship, friendship, and various associational ties right through the village makes these smaller neighbourhood groups much less significant.  The Public Road is the locus of all the principal shops, the communal water pipes, the market and various public meetings, and this becomes the focal point of the village where everyone meets everyone else.

Although the main division in church membership between the Congregational and Anglican churches does not have extensive ramifications in other spheres of activity, it is interesting to note that once again it is supposed to have had its origin in a situation of hostility.  The story is that originally everyone in the village attended the Congregational or ‘Mission’ church, and when a dispute arose over the conduct of one of the ministers, the congregation split, and that faction which was most