Family and Colour in Jamaica - an ethnographic re-reading

In recent months I have returned to some of the classical early kinship studies in Caribbean anthropology with the goal of mining for interesting themes and patterns that might spark dialogue with the ethnographic info I have collected during fieldwork in Dominica. 

This morning Jamaican anthropologist Fernando Henriques' Family and Colour in Jamaica (1953) fell through my door (a heavy eyed late night Amazon purchase I'd forgotten making some weeks ago). 

I read somewhere that a good ethnography is one that contains sufficient sociological richness and detail to be read as the author directs you, and then re-read, revealing its potential for alternative reinterpretation and reanalysis. This is one such ethnography. 

Here's a brief meditation on and rereading of the place of the father in Henriques' account with reference to a short autobiographical portrait of a 'lower class' schoolgirl that Henriques has annexed in his appendix.

For the most part the book is the kind of empirical overview of 'social organization' that was typical of the day - attempting to offer a cogent and comprehensive ordering of kinship across the class-colour strata of Jamaican society. 

Yet it  also seems the author felt a commitment to the first person narratives of two female interlocutors collected during his fieldwork (the diary of a Jamaican schoolgirl constitutes the similarly rich appendix II) and as such wanted them to go into print, despite convention forcing him to append them at the back of the book. His choice is a wise one though, it leaves them analytically open since appendixed items didn't demand authorial elucidation and as such they are allowed to speak for themselves. 

In the main body of the text in a chapter on 'lower class families' Henriques outlines the role of father in relation to his procreative kin (children, child-mother) and household:

[see red lined section in scan below (as you'll  observe I enjoy owning books as you can write in them with pen!)]

However, despite the 'minor' role of the 'absent' or unconcerned father and the occasional proud father when viewed structurally, 'Appendix III: Fragment of A Lower Class Autobiography' reveals a subject-oriented account that positions father/step father at the centre of a young girl's kinship world. Here we glimpse the kind of richness, depth of field and audibility of voice that would only become visible decades later in anthropology.

Approaching Caribbean family life from this angle urges us to interrogate the matrifocal thesis which would be later later introduced by RT Smith, and to which Henriques  formal observations above fore-run . In this account the father-daughter is the most centrally 'focal' relation through the optics of the narrator/protagonist, rather than the objectifying position of observer who might label the arrangement as matrifocal if they were simply observing from without. I offer this interpretation as a complementary counterpoint to matrifocal interpretations, suggesting the simultaneity of multiple perspectives on kinship from each subject-position in  ego-centered radial networks of kin - with dyadic bonds of varying intensity - could yield new conclusions about who's symbolically, practically, emotionally 'focal' in kin relations at a given moment. 

This sketch (below) could represent the girl's kin network in the autobiographical account below. It might be methodologically productive to call this a polyfocal reading of kinship arrangements if we were able to gather the subject centered accounts of each kin member mentioned and bring them at in analytic level into conversation.

[the size of dot connotes intensity/significance of relationship]

In the account that follows, a 34 year old woman recalls moments in her childhood through her own words. Interesting to reflect on is the significance of her father in structuring her kinship world:his protective  patriarchal (almost Oedipal) 'ownership' of her chastity, body and sexuality; his encouraging her to be hardy and learn to fight; hers and his tears upon her discovering he was her 'step father' not biological father; and the everyday taken-for-granted intimacies of his routinized food-sharing with her, her sleeping patterns with him and the mother, their playful observation of his provisioning banana trees through the window, and the episode of being separated during a hurricane as he walked her to school. 

These richly evidenced forms of everyday paternal practice seem far from anomalous to the narrator, yet the book up to that point conceals such realities behind concerns with familial form. 

It might be fascinating to see the complexity that such a close re: reading of other canonic Caribbean kinship studies might excavate. 

Below is a scanned copy of the appendix (I hope this is legal)

'Fragment of A Lower Class Autobiography'

For readers whom this book is of interest, a book about the Henriques family and their experience of pioneering prewar migration to the UK may be of interest too. It is titled The Jippa Jappa Hat Merchant and His Family