The Caribbean Counter-plantation Rural Formation Heritage and the Contemporary Search for Fundamentals

Abstract

Caribbean rural communities have been experiencing profound transformations since their own process of formation. They emerged within colonisation processes, with people from different cultures, most of whom were not from the region and did not choose this area voluntarily, but came to live there either by force or by chance. The difficulties of constituting new communities from diversity (from a combination of fragments of the previous cultural configuration from which they had been alienated and necessary elements of their new type of existence) were further exacerbated by colonial domination, which implied unequal valorisation of the different ethnic backgrounds. Caribbean rural communities have had to shape their existence within this complex situation, in the face of the random violence of an exuberant nature, alien to immigrant inhabitants, and in a turbulent history of domination by what were at different periods the most powerful nations of the world, interwoven with the conflicts of an economy defined essentially, from its very inception, by the commercial exchanges of international demands. Faced with uncontrollable changing realities of uncertainty and domination, within a cultural scenery of diversity, the spontaneous investing of communality with new meaning became an essential element of our cultural response to change — an important sphere (within such powerful limitations) for the exercise of freedom — and communality itself a fundamental value.