Creolization in Anthropological Theory and in Mauritius

Abstract

A great amount of intellectual energy has been invested in cultural mixing during the last decades. Reacting against an idea of boundedness, internal homogeneity, and stability that has been associated with mainstream twentieth-century anthropology, hundreds—possibly thousands—of anthropologists have tried to redefine, reform, revolutionize, or even relinquish that abhorred “C ” word—”culture. ” The range of engagement is suggested in the apparent congruence between postmodernist American anthropologists (for example, Clifford & Marcus 1986) and their now classic critique of the Geertzian notion of cultural integration, and the older European critique of the structural-functionalist idea of social inte-gration, which was led by people such as Barth (1966), whose rationalism and naturalism is everything but postmodernist. In both cases, presup-positions of integrated wholes, cultures or social structures, have been debunked. From being a discipline concentrating its efforts on understanding

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