My own combination of these three fields would not be possible without thespaces already opened by those mentioned above. As a final opening thought, I note that anthropologists and social scientists involved in contemporary productions must consider the consequences of collaboration. And they must attend to the reflexive modes that are engendered within and between institutions and disciplines. If “the essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity,” then we must also consider the question, what sort of tyrannies are perpetuated by the institutionalization of interdisciplinary complex systems approaches?This attention to and tension around the internalization of social science in the living laboratory of The Bahamas runs through this dissertation and through my own participation in scientific productions there, and it was the feeling of this tension that started me on the path to what would become this project. In the summer of 2002, long before this dissertation was conceived of, I traveled to The Bahamas for the first time to conduct research towards the completion of my undergraduate thesis in environmental biology. Out of several ongoing projects from which biology students were to choose to participate as a project assistant, I chose to join the American Museum of Natural History’s Bahamas Biocomplexity Project and their initial attempt to administer socioeconomic surveys in fishing communities in The Bahamas. I was told that this social aspect of the project would be integrated,ebb flow table after a period of years, with regional biological and environmental data in order to put together a systemic model of the relationship between local human populations and the regional marine ecosystem functioning in order to inform policy on the creation and management of a proposed marine reserve network .

It was my questioning of this notion of the possibility and promise of “integration” and scientific holism that eventually inspired my own collaborations in The Bahamas, presented here.The arena of Caribbean Studies is one example of critical scholarship which interrogates social and historical categories and forms. I engage with this work throughout this dissertation in order to consider how we might think of the laboratory of The Bahamas today and how we might come to experiment in and inhabit the world. And yet an analysis of the living laboratory of The Bahamas does not flow easily from Caribbean Studies, and this is precisely because The Bahamas both is and is not Caribbean, and because the familiar objects and orientations of Caribbean social science might not adequately speak to some of what is happening there in the contemporary moment. My work in The Bahamas has taught me about the politics of being Caribbean. “Caribbeaness” is a complex attribution with which The Bahamian state and Bahamian people grapple with continually. Historically, The Bahamas has been subject to the same wide ranging and influential events as the rest of the Caribbean region, most notably the transatlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the 20th Century independence movement. And yet, The Bahamas has been excluded from many collections of social science on the Caribbean and is usually not listed as a Caribbean country when scholars discuss the countries of the region, though it is often categorized as part of the Caribbean Region when it comes to international state politics. For example, the United States’ Central Intelligence Bureau lists it as a Caribbean nation. This confusion results from more than the fact that The Bahama Islands are not in the Caribbean Sea . It has been written that Bahamians do not consider themselves Caribbean because their affinities and trade ties lie more with the US than with the other islands.It has also been written that The Bahamas, due to its long history of success with tourism, is too wealthy to be classed with the rest of the Caribbean, or even the Caribbean of former British colonies.

The Bahamian government has reservations about its membership with the Caribbean economic community and its subsequent inclusion in the Caribbean free market. In this vein, I am interested in the ways in which The Bahamas does and does not exercise its “Caribbeanness,” and I cannot begin with the analytic assumption that this is a Caribbean place, even if these islands share a Caribbean history. This observation has necessitated an investigation into Caribbean Studies and Caribbean Anthropology in order to gauge how to relate this living laboratory to the discipline’s themes, conversations, and tensions.The social science literature on the Caribbean is extensive and diverse, and throughout the 20th Century development of Caribbean Studies the Caribbean area has become a specific “testing ground” for social scientific research and a metaphoric representation of evolving social forms. Through the exposition of case studies, the delineation of social models, and the evocation or refutation of sociological and anthropological problems and conceptual orientations, The Caribbean has provided ground for the production and deconstruction of such notions as cultural contact, New World society, class solidarity and diversity, systems of global production, colonial history, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, nationalism, transnationalism, diaspora, identity politics, globalization, creolization, paradise, and modernity- much of this scholarship under the rubric of colonial/postcolonial studies which variously tackle the theorizing of the practices and politics of oppression and resistance. The particular contingencies of specific Caribbean places have come, variously and inconsistently, to stand for general truths about kinds of postcolonial human nature, or their refutation and/or the nature and practice of postcolonial social theory itself. It is not a stretch to say that the Caribbean has come to be understood as a sort of living laboratory for colonial and postcolonial social research. Yet, during my time in The Bahamas I encountered processes, specific events, and situations that the academic genealogy of Caribbean social science cannot quite speak to because there are many processes at work simultaneously economic, biological, anthropological, and more. This creates a situation which forces one to create cross-cutting conceptual combinations in order to tell new stories and to ask new questions which may or may not be deemed postcolonial, but which owe a debt to this scholarship in any case.

David Scott’s work provides a sense of reading diverse literatures together, and he captures how one might successfully work with postcolonial studies and build off it to create a new orientation. Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s work speaks to a postmodern understanding of the Caribbean, tracing the islands as a form of thought, discussing the mystery, ambiguity, and dynamism the region has historically presented to the world.Scott has a complex approach to the consideration of the postcolonial contemporary Caribbean. His is a critique of those authors who seek to re-imagine the colonial past in the hope of altering the present, and he notes that little consideration has been given to what it is about the present which necessitates revising the past. He writes, “the precise nature of the relation between pasts, presents, and futures has rarely ever been specified and conceptually problematized. It has tended, rather, to be assumed, to be taken for granted.”Scott notes that most postcolonial Caribbean critiques, such as those criticisms of various forms of anticolonial nationalism, take up the goals of nationalist movements,hydroponic grow table and explain how they have failed, as answers, in the present. What these critiques don’t do, however, is consider the problems that the anticolonial nationals constructed in the first place. They merely assume that the colonial problems then, classic Fanonian problems of colonial racism and oppression, are the same as the postcolonial problems now. This, for Scott, tends to lead to the exposition of the negative structures of colonial power and to the concomitant narrative description of a romanticized subaltern agency in the face of this negating power. Scott’s view is different: “it is our postcolonial questions and not our answers that demand our critical attention.” In order to rethink postcolonial Caribbean questions, Scott arrives at the conception of the temporal problem-space. This is the discursive context of dispute and intervention around which questions, answers, and stakes are posed, and this is related to the notion that criticism within a problem-space, Scott’s own goal, must be strategic and alert in order to determine whether the“questions it is trying to answer continue to be questions worth having answers to.” Such criticism poses new hope for the proposition of political alternatives in our present and for the imagination of possible futures because the re-conception of the problem opens new space for the conception of possible responses. Scott’s main example in his monograph is C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, the famous anti-colonial and epic narrative of the Haitian Revolution and the tragedy of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Tragedy, Scott notes, problematizes the “view of human history as moving teleologically and transparently toward a determinate end, or as governed by a sovereign and omnisciently rational agent.”

Tragedy raises doubts about the relation between pasts, presents, and futures, it exposes the “hubris of Enlightenment and civilization” and points toward a more complex and contingent understanding of human life.With such a conceptual view of tragedy and problem-space in mind, Scott hopes to reread The Black Jacobins as a work which moved beyond the anti-colonial, a work which provides grounds with which to critique the postcolonial present. In a meditation on modernity, Scott discusses critiques of James as unaware of the diversity within modernity, stating that the Enlightenment idioms promoted by the French Revolution were an important aspect of Toussaint’s revolutionary subjectivity and that to worry otherwise is to miss the point that subaltern resistance is no longer at stake in the way that it was. The relevant questions for Scott concern the problem of modernity, understood in the Foucauldian sense of a positive formation of power that shapes the material and epistemological conditions of thought and possibility. Toussaint L’Ouverture, in this schema, becomes a conscript of modernity, not only a resisting agent. The plantation is also reconsidered in this view as a form of modern power which shaped conditions of slavery and subjectivity, and this moves the consideration of slavery away from the anti-colonial criticisms of its negative effects and the search for agency. He notes that “what is at stake here is not whether the colonized accommodated or resisted but how colonial power transformed the ground on which accommodation or resistance was possible in the first place, how colonial power reshaped or reorganized the conceptual and institutional conditions of possibility of social action and its understanding.”Thus, for Scott, Toussaint is a conscript of the founding modernity of the Caribbean, a founding modernity that continues to shape the thoughts and lives of others in the region. The lack of a visible indigenous population in the Caribbean, and the forced and brutal “civilizing”process of plantation slavery, make the Caribbean the inaugural form of modernity. In the plantation, slaves and masters were altered in modern ways and inserted into modern global processes that would come to matter for reasons because of their dehumanization and violence. The point is, for Scott, that the Caribbean put forth new conditions of life, creating the West Indian as the conscripted subject and object of a modern ethos. But how do we describe the contemporary ground that shapes these conditions of life in the Caribbean today? How do we characterize the current confluences of productivity that create the region as a particular kind of problem space? Benitz-Rojo has a complex framework for nonreductive thinking about the region which I find helpful as a frame for the discussion to follow. His analytic mode of “Chaos,” referring to the advent of disorder in the passage of time, nonetheless has an emphasis on repeating dynamic states and regularities. He writes, “I have tried to analyze certain aspects of the Caribbean while under the influence of this attitude, whose end is not to find results, but processes, dynamics, and rhythms that show themselves within the marginal, the regional, the incoherent, the heterogeneous, or, if you like, the unpredictable that coexists with us in our everyday world.” The trope of repetition, within this mode is especially salient for Benitez-Rojo, because only repetition as difference, the motion of irreducible change, can be identified in the fluidity of Chaos that is the sociocultural Caribbean.