Fitness and Flexibility: Funeral Wakes in St. Lucia, West Indies

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is threefold: 1. to provide a detailed ethnography of the wakes in the Caribbean Creole-speaking island of St. Lucia; 2. to investigate the meaning of variation of the musical activities performed on such occasions; 3. to propose the study of human action in relation to constraints, i.e., examining the choice of musical genres performed at a given wake in conjunction with the various sorts of contexts (from Becker 1983) or what we may call constraints-languages, nature, social interactions, prior texts (contexts, memories, knowledge), medium, and silence (both the unsaid and the unsayable) which play a decisive role in the way participants act and react. In brief, I suggest that St. Lucian wake practice can be best understood by studying how the actors experience the complexities of their situations and attempt to respond to them strategically.' This analysis shows the various burdens that constraints of all sorts place upon them and, in turn, provides much of the context for understanding the actors' motives and the kinds of associations they construct and rely upon for dealing with their situations (Ortner 1984: 152; see also Geertz 1973). Few attempts have been made to document funeral wake celebrations in the West Indies. The informative article on the ethnographic setting of the Nine Night Ceremony in Jamaica by George E. Simpson (1957) remains an exception. In the Creole-speaking islands, the conte, a storytelling genre characteristic and germane to the wakes of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti (Cesaire 1981; Dauphin 1980; Desroches 1981; Jardel 1977) has received much attention in the literature but the funeral context in which the conte is told and the musical activities sometimes performed on such an occasion are rarely described.2 The original goal of this paper was to provide a mapping of the wakes in St. Lucia, an island where I did field work during the summers of 1980, 1981, 1982, and the full-year of 1982-83. My study was complicated by the fact that funeral wakes in St. Lucia vary greatly from one performance to