Article -- “Idiosyncracies of Place”: A Conversation with La Vaughn Belle [arcthemagazine.com]

[Michael O'Neal]

A post which might be of interest to Caribbeanists -- St Croix - “Idiosyncracies of Place”: A Conversation with La Vaughn Belle. An excerpt and relevant url follow:

DK: You’ve said that you ‘re interested in “the provincial and the domestic”. What does this mean?

LVB: The provincial often has a negative connotation. People think of small towns, small islands, small mindedness. But I am interested in all the things that make a culture and a people who they are – the idiosyncrasies of a place. I had a class once in semiotics that taught that in every culture there is a “semiosphere” that only the people of that culture can understand. My interest in the provincial is about wanting to know that space as best I can.
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http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2012/06/idiosyncracies-of-place-a-con...

arcthemagazine.com

[John McCreery]

I agree wholeheartedly that, "that the piece was well done and raises many issues regarding place and identity." But place and identity strike me as far too abstract to be of more than academic interest. As I was reading the bits about "Freedom House," I found myself thinking about freed slaves before and after the Civil War in the United States, the shanties in which tenant farmers both black and white lived in the American South, the images captured by Walker Evans in <i>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</i>, and, then, because I did my research in Taiwan, wondering what it meant to former tenant farmers in Taiwan to own their land after Land Reform. Then, off on another tangent, I found myself remembering Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." 

[Huon Wardle]

I agree; that was the part of the discussion on the cosmopolitanism of the Caribbean that stood out for me. Of course, I might well say that because I have written on that topic extensively. What also struck me were the comments on the exception-that-proves-the-rule - Cuba; where cosmopolitanism still has a Marxist internationalist inflection. It is a nice piece, thanks for posting it Michael.

[Keith Hart]

DK: I want to go back to something you said about your interests and how your practice is very assertive in its “local-ness” but at the same time your experience and education seem to be very international. This is a quality of the Caribbean that seems to interest a lot of people outside the region right now. The way that Caribbean artists (and people in general) seem to fuse that assertive locality with a cosmopolitan outlook can be perceived as a contradiction, even though it really isn’t. Would you agree?

LVB: I think it is who we are naturally as a people. Every major civilization has crossed these islands so it’s natural that there is an “international”-ness about us. But yes, as Caribbean people we are often seen as insular, and we are, but we are a people who also spend a lot of our time looking out too. At least if you live on a small island you are constantly reminded by the sea that there is something else out there and there is a yearning to see and be a part of that.

 

This exchange brings out the dialectic of place and movement that is so characteristic of the Caribbean islands. It is not just the openness of the sea, but that the islanders go everywhere and this adds to what makes home special. Great art opens up universal truth by going deep into local particulars. This is true of a number of humanistic disciplines including history, literature, ethnography and law. It's why the word critic means a judge. I can't see how anyone who read this article could miss that.

[Michael O'Neal]

Thanks for your observations, John.

I thought that the piece was well done and raises many issues regarding place and identity. The interview continues to evoke ongoing commentary on some of the other online sites, such as CSA's Facebook page, where it was also posted by ARC magazine.

Best regards,

M.

[John McCreery]

Michael, thanks for posting this. East Asia being where I live and work, the Caribbean is not an  everyday concern. This post is a useful reminder of other lives, other interests, the "other" that has always made anthropology so interesting. It also raises an interesting question: To what extent are the "idiosyncrasies of a place" of interest to anyone but those whose lives are entangled with that place. The problem is, of course, that there are too many places for more than a few to capture the attention of those whose lives and issues are elsewhere, and, judging by anthropology's history, that only happens when the idiosyncrasies speak in compelling ways to issues of wider interest.