#creolization

[pamietniko]

portes

New Orleans, Louisiana

[krista-venka]

We must not tell ourselves that the indeterminate, the uncertain, the un-obvious, is a weakness. We must say to ourselves that it opens our minds to unexpected forms of complexities. The Tremulous thought is not a thought out of fear, scared thinking, it is a thought that is opposed to systematic thinking. All the poets have said it. The gasping, the breathing, the pulse, the misfortunes, the fears, the insane hopes, and the sterile obsessions. All of these need to be relearned and remixed. The poetics of this endeavor seems more important than the categories of quick thinking, that lead to definitive and fixed conclusions. We understand the world better if we tremble with it.

Édouard Glissant in One World In Relation (2010), Manthia Diawara. Film.

[kemetic-dreams]

Maroon settlements often possessed a clannish, outsider identity. They sometimes developed Creole languages by mixing European tongues with their original African languages. One such maroon creole language, in Suriname, is Saramaccan. At other times, the maroons would adopt variations of a local European language (creolization) as a common tongue, for members of the community frequently spoke a variety of mother tongues.

The maroons created their own independent communities, which in some cases have survived for centuries, and until recently remained separate from mainstream society. In the 19th and 20th centuries, maroon communities began to disappear as forests were razed, although some countries, such as Guyana and Suriname, still have large maroon populations living in the forests. Recently, many of them moved to cities and towns as the process of urbanization accelerates.

[possessivesuffix]

Has this gotten much followup yet? The creolization theory as such looks good; but following this up with “telescoping” of the time depth of Sino-Tibetan to 4000-years-ish would be a bigger implication still I think.

We have abundant attested examples of the process of creolization in Tibeto-Burman (…) In every case this involves a radical simplification of the verbal system, replacing a tightly structured paradigm of argument indexation and specification of transitivity. Thus this must be taken as a likely hypothesis to explain similar changes which have occurred in times and places where we have no direct knowledge of the external situation. When we look at what we do know or can plausibly infer about the context in which the major creoloid branches (Sinitic, Bodo-Garo, Bodish, and Lolo-Burmese) of the family developed, in every instance a good case can be made that these branches were born in the kinds of situations where creolization is to be expected. Thus absent some other equally plausible account, this must be taken as the default explanation for the dramatic typological divergence of the branches and languages of Tibeto-Burman.

One important implication of this account is that our estimates of the time depth of the family are probably greatly exaggerated. If we think of the diversity of morphosyntactic structure which we see in the family as having evolved through “normal” language-internal processes, we will infer a long process of development. But under creolization a language can undergo very radical changes in phonology, lexicon and grammar in a very short time, measurable in centuries (the split of creoloid Singpho from archaic Jinghpaw is only a few centuries back; see S. Baruah 1985: 376, T. Baruah 1977) or even generations (again see Sun and Liu 2009 for a detailed case study of extremely rapid typological shift). It is quite plausible, and in my opinion probable, that the time of the breakup of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (including Sinitic) could be not that far – conceivably a millennium or less – prior to the time, 2,500-3,500 years ago, when we see the first creoloid branches, Sinitic, Bodo-Garo, and Lolo-Burmese, emerging into the light of history.

[tasavvur]

Édouard Glissant, from Poetics of Relation, translated by Betsy Wing

[ethicopoliticolit]

Creolization's genesis in sixteenth-century urban New Spain resides in an immersion in the cultural practices of power. Becoming a creole literally involved navigating the judicial maze with the intent of exploiting the possibilities offered by legal obligations and rights. This definition reminds us that persons of African descent, the first people identified as creoles (*criollos*) before 1560, did not configure their culture through the physical environment, diet, language, beliefs, kinship practices, and community structures alone. Creole culture included the customs, laws, and institutions that upheld the larger social structure and came to include an ability to navigate the various institutions of absolutism. [Para.] Cognizant that their competing juridical identities created an exploitable tool, Africans and their descendants seized the opportunity. Though patricians posed a serious physical threat, individuals drew on their creole consciousness for specific tactics. In this process, their command of Spanish—which shaped the ability of Africans and their descendants to represent themselves before scribes, royal officials, and ecclesiastics as royal subjects and devout Christians—played an important role. Even recent arrivals from Africa, *bozales*, immersed themselves in a new linguistic environment soon after landing in New Spain, acquiring fluency in the Castilian lexicon and morphology of power. Eventually, *bozales* learned to enlist the protection of crown and clergy, who, as representatives of the Spanish sovereign, often stood at odds with individual patricians. [Para.] This strategic awareness—the defining feature of creole consciousness—enabled the plebeian population, which included persons of African descent, to employ the law in their defense. As litigants, persons of African descent modified their life circumstances, yet they rarely, if ever, threatened to undermine Spanish rule. But in enabling a semblance of cultural autonomy, the litigious nature of Africans and their descendants also insinuated both slave and free even further into [the] workings of Spanish absolutism.

Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Indiana, 2003), 2-3.

[gdill52]

Cooperative Feministas

Cooperative Feministasare not quite so much Competitive Manifestos. In David Holmgren’s introduction to Permacultural Therapeutic Design,he contrasts “Industrial Culture” with “Sustainable Culture”kind of like comparing macho LeftBrain fundamentalist culturewith feminist RightBrain enculturation, nurturance, resonanceover the longer-term scenaria,rather than shorter-term dementio. Anyway,…

Cooperative Feministas

[gdill52]

Democratization Problems

I suppose you might have missed out on Paul Feyerabend’s,and especially Thomas Kuhn’s Problem of Incommensurabiity. Oh, not at all.I have not looked at science or cultureor languageor even your attempts at communicationquite the same since I ran across their big dilemma. Interestingly,it shares some dynamics with The Prisoner’s Dilemma,in WinWin NonZero Game Theory,but that is a mirror mapping…

Democratization Problems