Etnogénesis, hibridicación y consolidación de la identidad del pueblo miskitu

Abstract

With stunning detail and attention to its significance, Claudia García presents the construction and reconstruction of citizenship of the Miskitu group, also known as Miskito or Misquito, of the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The author’s principal theme is the social construction of Miskito ethnicity beginning with the group’s intensive contact with the Old World in the 1630s and continuing to the 1930s. The ethnic construct of citizenship is based on the concept of an “open” culture that is profoundly influenced by successive interaction with the Other, in this case, contact with the British and Spaniards in the Caribbean area, and especially with their ideas and lifestyles.The theoretical and methodological concept is based on the idea of ethnic citizenship. It is defined with precision and well laid out in eight chapters, each with a different focus on constructive aspects of ethnicity as well as the central points of Miskito history. The author understands ethnicity as a social and cultural construction in contrast to traditional concepts like “primordialism,” “instrumentalism,” or “essentialism.” In the constructive view, national and ethnic identities are products of historical forces. It is an anthropological and sociological approach to understanding ethnogenesis, the processes of hybridization of citizenship, and the changes of social-cultural collective identity of Miskito ethnicity. The analysis therefore includes economic, political, social, and cultural aspects, to which García adds the historical role of gender.The emergence of the Miskito group is a result of biological, social, and cultural miscegenation between Amerindians, Africans, and Europeans, starting with racial hybridism during the third decade of the sixteenth century. The social code of the Miskito permitted polygamy and promiscuity for reasons of biological and social reproduction. It was no surprise that many Miskito women had sexual and affective relations with the immigrants, who were mostly cimarróns (runaway African slaves) from the West Indies. From then on, Miskito society was formed by native Indians and peoples with African and Amerindian ancestry, or zambos.At the same time, the traditional social roles in the group began to change from activities clearly divided between men’s agricultural labor and women’s housekeeping to new forms of job sharing. This change was a consequence of the introduction of new consumer articles and firearms, mainly introduced by British pirates, adventurers, and merchants. This was possible by reason of the “free zone” status of the Miskito Coast, which for centuries was not controlled by colonial Spanish authorities but was under the political and economic dominion of the British Empire. With this zone and their regional partners, the Miskito, the British took possession of a significant geostrategic point in the backyard of Spanish Central America.The hybrid process concluded with the consolidation of the social, cultural, and political predominance of the Miskito along the Caribbean coast. Now, the local and regional Indian and zambo leaders installed their local kingdoms, adapted to the existing social and cultural conditions. From then on the leaders recognized and respected the greater responsibility of women for the socialization of new generations and for transmission of the indigenous culture, whereas politics and economics were incumbent on the men. Nevertheless, both women and men were flexible and adaptive in their economic, cultural, and social contacts with the others.The author emphasizes that this ability to assimilate the effects of permanent societal contact with incoming others was an important ethnic feature of the Miskito. This became evident once more when in 1849 the Protestant Moravian Church started its missionary work in the Miskito Coast area. García shows very clearly how religious conversion created an impulse toward a reformulation of the Miskito ethnic concept. The missionaries changed important elements of Miskito daily life by introducing their strict sense of morality. Traditional concepts like promiscuity and polygamy were abandoned; however, the men maintained their former conduct at a lower level.With her well-written and interesting book, Claudia García contributes to a series of new perspectives regarding the concepts of constructive ethnicity and ethnogenesis, and at the same time about the historical processes in the formation of hybrid societies and citizenship. Maps and a synchronoptic view of the regional history of the Caribbean and Central America would have been useful, but this minor comment does not detract from the high quality of the work. The book is a valuable, even indispensable resource for any scholar interested in ethnicity, in dynamic processes of contact between cultures and societies, and last but not least in a rewritten history of the Miskito.