Selling Tradition in Jamaica -- Katie Moore

Becker’s “Selling Tradition” and the discussion of the construction of the folk and its relationship to the marketplace brought to mind an experience I had years ago when visiting Jamaica.  I’ve been travelling to the island on and off since I was in my mother’s womb.  Although my family usually tries to avoid the more touristy areas, we almost always end up making a trip to the “straw market,” a large market with rows and rows of small shacks, each set up with its own set of beaded and woven jewelry, wood carvings, t-shirts, paintings, and other miscellany.  It’s a tourist trap, to be sure, and after all I am a tourist (although I consider myself a little more well seasoned to Jamaica than the hoards of cruise ship tourists).  There is a cruise ship port just down the road where hundreds of people disembark to explore the culture and scenery of Jamaica as a tropical paradise, and many make their way to the straw market nearby to purchase some kind of Jamaica trinket.  While I knew that the shirts sold at these stands were not hand-made products of these vendors, demonstrators hand-carving wooden sculptures and beading necklaces had me convinced that virtually everything else was made by the person selling it, or at least another Jamaican local.  So you can imagine my surprise when I turned over a small carved wooden turtle only to find a MADE IN CHINA sticker still on the turtle’s belly.  This was the first of many similar experiences there.

Since then, I’ve become much more aware of what seem to be anomalies in the crafts I find being sold in Jamaica.  Reading about the National Museum of American History contracting labor in China for mass-producing American folk-style quilts immediately brought me back to this past experience.  In holding this small wooden turtle, I was forced to confront Jamaican “folk” as a group of people intimately tied into a global economy, not only in their production and marketing of their products to a tourist population, but also through the acquisition of many of their products from foreign vendors much like most of the products we find here in the US.  Caribbean tourists, much like the Americans who embrace Appalachian and Indian crafts, are purchasing an “icon of an imagined past, provided by a group of contemporary citizens who had assumed the task of preserving a carefully selected version of the nation’s heritage in the present (Becker 1998). In Jamaica, those of us who explore the straw market are usually interested purchasing an icon of the imagined exotic Jamaican craftsman, a group that still works with their hands rather than machines to produce a cultural product.  Jamaica is an isolated island paradise, and as tourists often want that feeling of “authentic Jamaica” as a part of the experience (for the few hours we are off the cruise ship or outside our all-inclusive resort).

This begins to get at a deeper problem, a problem that Deloria touches on in “Indian Wars,” of the “folk” as a group that societies imagines as stuck in the past.  We view any change or adaptation to modern life as a negative and a loss of authentic culture.  In one of my archaeology classes on “culture contact” my professor mentioned that in a past semester one of the students in her class (who was actually studying Law here) brought up a statistic that when Indian groups are taken to trial, those who appear in court in “traditional dress’ have a significantly higher success rate than those dressing in Western business attire.  It doesn’t even matter if they are wearing their own tribe’s traditional regalia or some generalized version.  Perhaps this is because, as a folk group, Americans are more comfortable seeing Native Americans in clothes that appear traditional rather than as accepting them as contemporaries in a modern society. We like Jamaican participation in the global economy because it allows us the luxuries we have come to expect on vacation, regardless of the surrounding poverty, but maybe we like it less when we are confronted with something we thought was “authentically Jamaican” and instead was made in China just like many of the things we can find at home.  It is an interesting and problematic mindset that is perhaps based in the authenticity debate, but has implications running much deeper.