Creoles and Creolization

CREOLES AND CREOLIZATION

CREOLES AND CREOLIZATION. A "Creole" was originally a person of European or African origin born in America. The term referred to the French créoles of Louisiana, the African creoles of preemancipation Jamaica, or the Spanish criollos of Mexico. It was eventually applied adjectivally to a variety of cultural phenomena; for instance, the creole architecture of New Mexico, comprising both Indian and Spanish elements, described by George Kubler in The Religious Architecture of New Mexico in the Colonial Period and since the American Occupation (1990). The creole agriculture of the Mississippi River valley, analyzed by Daniel Usner, the creole medicine of South Carolina, studied by Mary Galvin, and the creole cuisine of Puerto Rico included French, Indian, and African contributions. On the other hand, the creole music and language of Georgia, interpreted by Richard Cullen Rath and J. L. Dillard respectively, seem to have only African and European roots.

Common to these manifestations of creole culture are contributions by at least two peoples under the influence

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of the American topography and climate. This conflation or syncretism has come to be described by some historians as "creolization." One of the early attempts to describe this process was that of Melville Herskovits, who in 1938 advanced the idea of "acculturation" in Acculturation. However, this concept had the disadvantage of suggesting some lesser culture submitting to a dominant (European) one. In 1976, Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price's An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past, suggested that the concept of a "Creole culture" might better describe the conflation of African and European elements. This idea was surely an advance on the idea of "acculturation," but it did not initially take into account the influence of Indian peoples, well explained by the work of James Axtell (for instance, The European and the Indian ).

Meanwhile, linguists developed the idea of "creolization" as set out in the work edited by Dell Hymes, Pidginization and Creolization of Languages (1971). This seemed to many historians a suitable concept, for it could take into account not only the African and European contributions but also the Indian ones, all under the novel influence of American geography. Subsequently the idea of créolité, the result of the process of creolization, also emerged.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, A. James, ed. "Who/What Is Creole?" Plantation Society in the Americas 5, no. 1(1998): special issue.

Axtell, James. The European and the Indian. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Buisseret, David, and Steven G. Reinhardt, eds. Creolization in the Americas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000.

Herskovits, Melville. Acculturation. New York: J. J. Augustin, 1938.

Dell Hymes. Pidginization and Creolization of Languages. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

Kubler, George. The Religious Architecture of New Mexico in the Colonial Period and since the American Occupation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976.

David Buisseret

See also African American Studies ; Ethnohistory .