Creolization in the Americas

Abstract

Creolization in the Americas. By David Buisseret et al., eds. (College Station: Texas AM paper, $16.95.) The scholars who were invited to speak at the thirty-second Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures were asked to examine various aspects and problems in the history of in the Americas. The editors, David Buisseret and Steven G. Reinhardt, believe the term creolization is one of vital importance in the ongoing efforts to understand the societies that have developed in the Atlantic world as Africans, American Indians, and Europeans came into contact with each other and with new environments. They do admit, however, that there are problems with the term in both contemporary and modern meanings. In the Introduction, David Buisseret, an authority on West Indian and Southwestern subjects, discusses the terms creole and and presents his arguments for replacing terms such as acculturation with these words, as they reflect in a better and more precise way the mutual, rather than dominant, cultural exchanges among the various peoples who met in the Americas. Buisseret notes that some Europeans-such as the Spanish, Portuguese, and French-were more open to cultural exchanges than the English. He believes that the word creole is well understood in its meaning, or at least better understood than other concepts. In the first of the essays, Buisseret examines the of in Jamaica in the seventeenth century. He points out that, in the past, historians often have seen little intercultural influence on this very English colony. He then proceeds to show how the English were changed by their interactions with new peoples and a new environment. He discusses changes in food, dress, architecture, medicine, language, music, laws, and even politics. He concludes that, by 1700, both Africans and Englishmen in Jamaica were different from either their forebears or their contemporaries in Africa and England. Daniel H. Usner Jr. writes about the of agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley. He points out that the term creole is one that has had a muddled history and has meant different things to different people at different times. He proposes in this essay to provide an understanding of how the elite disdained the importance of creolized subsistence agriculture and ridiculed the small farmers, often Acadian, who followed a mixed agricultural economy, eventually leading outsiders also to undervalue the adjustments made by these people and to consider them quaint and peculiar rather than sensible people who adapted to maintain a way of life. As Usner knows and appreciates, many in South Louisiana continue to follow some of the practices they learned over the centuries. Mary L. Galvin, in an excellent study of medicine in South Carolina, defines as a process of selective adaptation (64). …