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Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic

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The Study of Ethnicity in the Dutch Caribbean

Gert J. Oostindie

To cite this Article: Oostindie, Gert J. , 'The Study of Ethnicity in the Dutch
Caribbean', Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 1:2, 215 - 230
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/17442220600859445
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17442220600859445

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Taylor and Francis 2007

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Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

Vol. 1, No. 2, September 2006, pp. 215230

The Study of Ethnicity in the Dutch

Caribbean
Full Circle to Furnivall?
Gert J. Oostindie1

This paper traces the origins of ethnic studies on the former Caribbean Dutch colonies
to pioneering work done in the Dutch East Indies, notably J. S. Furnivalls concept of
the plural society. The review of the rise, fall, and recent partial rediscovery of that
analysis is followed by brief discussions of studies on ethnicity available in English
regarding Suriname and the six Antillean islands. The subsequent analysis focuses on the
exodus from the Dutch Caribbean towards the metropolis, paying special attention to the
impacts of the rise of transnational communities on ethnicity. The closing section argues
that ethnicity remains of paramount significance in the contemporary Dutch Caribbean
as well as its diaspora and suggests some directions for future research.
Keywords: Ethnicity; historiography; anthropology;
Caribbean; Suriname; Netherlands Antilles; Aruba

plural

societies;

Much has been written about the paradoxical identity of the Caribbean. After decades
of research and writing on this part of the world, Sidney Mintz (1996) defined
the region as an oikoumene at best, certainly not a culture area in the conventional
anthropological sense. Franklin W. Knight (1990) did characterize the entire
Caribbean as belonging to one culture area, yet much of his widely used textbook
on the region emphasizes its fundamental heterogeneity. So have introductory
books since.
This paradox of significant variations within a common structure of course stems
mainly from the divergent legacies left by the major colonial powers in the region, the
differential timing (and in only a few cases, absence) of slave plantation development,
and contrasts in immigration patterns and hence varying ethnic composition of local
populations. While metropolitan interests and strategies coincided to a large degree,
the colonial powers brought different European languages, religions and governmental systems. Moreover, the degree to which they sent their own citizens to
the Caribbean differed tremendously. All European colonies received vast numbers

ISSN 17442222 (print)/ISSN 17442230 (online)/06/02021516 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17442220600859445

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G. J. Oostindie

of enslaved Africans, followed in some cases by indentured Asians; yet in the

Spanish-speaking Caribbean, European immigration was far more important than
in all other territories. Then again, in varying degrees, creolization the creation
of novel New World cultures out of the encounter, in asymmetric power relations, of
Old World cultures in a new setting became the central defining trait of the
Caribbean.
For practical purposes, the contemporary Caribbean is often subdivided along
presumed linguistic lines mirroring the four major European colonial powers.
Thus, we have the Spanish, the French, the British and the Dutch Caribbean
(the Danish transferred their Caribbean colonies, todays Virgin Islands, to the
United States in the early 20th century). Any Caribbeanist knows the pitfalls of such
crass generalizations. In most cases, the strong constitutional and economic relations
between the four sub-regions and their former metropolitan powers are a thing of
the past. Linguistically, most of the Spanish and British Caribbean fits rather well
into this scheme provided the thoroughly creolized language variations are included.
The so-called French Caribbean in contrast is dominated by the nation of Haiti
where French has long ceased to be a living language for all but the local elites.
The remaining French departments doutre-mer, again, are characterized by a
linguistic continuum with pure French at the one pole, French Creole on the other.
Arguably though, it is the Dutch Caribbean that fits most poorly into a regional
mould referring to metropolitan languages. Prior to the 20th century, Dutch was
hardly spoken in the Dutch Caribbean colonies: many among the small local
European elites spoke Portuguese, Spanish, French or German rather than Dutch
as their mother tongue. In Suriname, the African-origins population spoke
Sranantongo, a Creole language with a mainly English-derived vocabulary. The
Maroons in the interior had developed their own distinct Creole languages, whereas
the recent Asian immigrants were in the early phases of creolization of theirs.
In the Dutch Windward Antilles, West Indian English was dominant. The dominant
language in the Leeward Antilles was Papiamentu, a Creole language with a
predominantly Portuguese vocabulary.
Dutch therefore was a marginal language in these colonies and would have
withered if not for seemingly counterintuitive postwar political developments. While
the Antilles remain part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Dutch is a marginal
language in everyday life. At the same time, the colonial language has a contested
dominion in the educational and bureaucratic realms. In contrast, since Surinames
independence in 1975, the local variant of Dutch seems to be displacing Sranantongo
as the dominant lingua franca. Within specific ethnic communities, other languages
are still widely spoken. Moreover, even a casual observer will remark on the
permanent code switching between the Surinamese variant of Dutch, Sranantongo
and often a specific ethnic tongue (Carlin & Arends, 2002).
This is not simply an observation on language. From whatever perspective one
studies the so-called Dutch Caribbean, one is struck by the very late incorporation of
these former colonies into the cultural fold of the metropolis. The preceding
centuries witnessed divergent trajectories for the three major colonies in this order,

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217

Suriname, Curacao, and St Eustatius which would deepen the fissures within this
sub-region. The outcome was heterogeneity remarkable even by Caribbean standards.
Today, over 450,000 some estimates advance half a million people live in the
republic of Suriname against 250,000 in the six Antillean islands which still form part
of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Almost half a million citizens with Caribbean
roots live in the former European metropolis, the result of an exodus that started
about 35 years ago in response to the imminent step towards sovereignty of Suriname
and continued as a result of both growing income disparities between the two sides of
the Atlantic and chain migrations. As for the rest of the region, the study of ethnicity
in the contemporary Dutch Caribbean therefore by necessity includes issues of
transnationalism and ambivalent nation building.
The total population of Suriname and the Dutch Antillean islands pales in
comparison to the other sub-regions of the Caribbean. As moreover most of the
pertinent literature was published in the Dutch language, it is not surprising that even
for most Caribbeanists the Dutch Caribbean presents a conspicuous void. There are
only three significant exceptions to this general observation. First, the Maroon
societies of Suriname have attracted broad scholarly attention since the 1930s. Next,
Suriname has regularly served as a case study for the plural society paradigm. Finally,
Suriname and particularly Curacao have found a place in general theories of race,
color and ethnicity in the Caribbean through the seminal work of Harry Hoetink.
Inevitably, the following discussion has to be subdivided into separate sections for
Suriname, the Leeward Antilles and the Windward islands. The closing section
addresses the emergence of new scholarly directions inspired by the twin issues of
national identity and the emergence of truly transnational Dutch Caribbean
communities.
The emphasis in this paper is on scholarship published in widely accessible
languages. In this case, this is mainly English. Even if most work on ethnicity in the
Dutch Caribbean has been published in Dutch, these works have subsequently found
their way to English-language publications through translations or incorporation in
general surveys. Only marginal reference is therefore made to Dutch-language
studies. Moreover, and with the exception of a handful of seminal older studies, the
discussion is limited to work published since the 1990s.2 My general observations on
history, politics and ethnicity in the Dutch Caribbean in a comparative perspective
are discussed at length elsewhere (Oostindie, 2005).
Of Plural and Segmented Societies
Over 60 years ago, the British colonial servant and eminent scholar, J. S. Furnivall
(1939, 1948), minted the concept of the plural society. The core elements of this
theory are well known to Caribbeanists. A plural society comprises two or more
elements or social orders which live side by side, yet without mingling, in one
political unit. Ethnicity and ethnic difference are its central features. Geographical
propinquity is accompanied by social segregation and a caste-like division of
labor. The various ethnic groups relate to one another mainly in market transactions.
On the political level, this translates into a lack of common social will.

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By implication, the colonial state functions as the mediating actor between these
deeply divided groups, keeping together what otherwise would fall apart, peacefully
or worse. Furnivall thought that local nationalism by definition would be ethnically
defined and thus divisive. After decolonization, these plural societies would at best be
consolidated as pluralist federations, at worst disintegrate in anarchy.
Working in British Malaya, Furnivall identified the contemporary Southeast Asian
states of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore as the prime examples of plural societies.
Yet the concept was quickly taken up in studies in the British West Indies (Smith,
1965; compare Bolland, 1992, 2005) and Suriname. In his classic 1949 history
Samenleving in een grensgebied (translated as Frontier Society, van Lier, 1971; see also
van Lier, 1950), R. A. J. van Lier placed Furnivalls concept of pluralism at the center
of his analysis. In his view too, the colonial state had developed from a mainly
oppressive apparatus to the foremost mediating actor in this deeply divided society.
Van Liers plural society approach, in turn, inspired the early work of H. Hoetink on
Curacao. In his subsequent work, Hoetink would prefer the concept of segmented
society over plural society.3 In fact, the two terms have since been used by dozens of
scholars interchangeably.
Scholarly criticism on the plural society thesis quickly emerged, focusing on
the unduly binary oppositions between disparate socio-religious ethnic groups as
suggested by Furnivall, the virtual absence of the dimension of class, the rigidity of
the model in view of the constructed nature of ethnicity and ethnic boundaries, and
the rather apodictic pessimism regarding the post-independence feasibility of these
states. This scholarly criticism had an evident political dimension. If, after al,
Furnivall was right, independence spelt disaster. Thus the refutation of the plural
society was a nationalist challenge as well.
Indeed, neither in Southeast Asia or the Caribbean did decolonization lead to the
emergence of extreme pluralist states, much less to disintegration. The state
boundaries inherited from the colonial era are the same ones today, local political
elites voted in office in open elections have taken the place of colonial officers.
This success notwithstanding, many observers have pointed to the persistence of the
ethnic divisions characterizing these societies (e.g. Lijphart, 1977). The re-emergence
of ethnicity as a central issue in the study of both western and non-western studies
since the 1990s has stimulated a wider renewal of scholarly interest in the plural
society model. A recent research project on Southeast Asian Pluralisms suggests that
Furnivalls theory still has a baffling relevance to contemporary Southeast Asia
(Hefner, 2001). So what about the Caribbean, and particularly the erstwhile Dutch
colonies in the region?
Suriname
Suriname continues to be portrayed as the plural society par excellence (Hoefte, 2001;
Hoefte & Meel, 2001). Just as neighboring Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, the
country has a population strongly divided into African and Asian components.
Yet the Surinamese population is far more compartmentalized than that. The
population of African descent is divided in a majority of mainly urban Creoles and a

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219

significant minority of Maroons. The latter, in turn, belong to one of six different
ethnic groups. The Asian population again is more differentiated than anywhere else
in the Caribbean. While a majority is of British Indian descent, a second significant
segment is of Javanese origin.
Alongside the major African and Asian population, the country has housed various
minority groups, ranging from several Amerindian groups through longstanding but
small Chinese and Lebanese communities to recent but increasingly significant
Brazilian and, again, new Chinese immigrants. Ethnic mixing resulted in the
emergence of a small colored elite in colonial times and more recently in a modest
degree of AfricanAsian douglarization. Permanent Dutch presence is numerically
insignificant.
The study of Maroon societies has the longest scholarly tradition and has produced
studies that in turn were deeply influential to African-American studies at large.
Attracted by what at the time seemed to be true remnants of Africa in the Americas,
Melville and Frances Herskovits did fieldwork among the Maroons as early as the
1920s (Herskovits & Herskovits, 1934, 1967). While subsequent research has
questioned not only the conclusions but even the quality of the fieldwork of
the Herskovitses (Price & Price, 2003), their work certainly stimulated interest in
Maroon history and ethnicity.
Romanticizing Africa in the New World literature has risen from this
anthropology (Counter & Evans, 1981) and continues to inspire travel agents
brochures. Yet the brunt of serious scholarly work in this field has focused on
ethnogenesis and cultural creativity among these communities of escaped slaves in
the tropical rain forest of Suriname. Seminal studies on the Saramaka Maroons in the
twilight zone of ethnology, history and art were published jointly by Richard and
Sally Price (Price & Price, 1999) and individually (Richard Price, 1983, 1990;
Sally Price, 1989, 1993). Another anthropologist couple, Bonno Thoden van Velzen
and Wilhelmina van Wetering, published major studies on the Ndjuku Maroons
(Thoden van Velzen, 1995; Thoden van Velzen & van Wetering, 1988, 2004).
The work of the Prices has particularly made a major contribution to the
understanding of the origins of African-American culture and to the development
of the concept of creolization (Mintz & Price, 1992; Price, 2001). This is indeed
a unique case of empirical research on the Dutch Caribbean eventually transcending
the limitations of community, country and even area studies to contribute to
fundamental debates in anthropology. The concept of creolization, while not
uncontested, has since inspired various researchers (e.g. Bilby, 2001, on Maroon
culture, and Van Stipriaan, 2003, on creolization).
The Second World War meant the break up unanticipated by the metropolis of
the Dutch colonial empire. The major colony, Indonesia, proclaimed independence
in 1945 and finally attained formal independent status in 1949. Suriname and
the Netherlands Antilles opted for a continuation of the constitutional bonds but did
achieve domestic autonomy (Oostindie and Klinkers, 2003). The parting with
Indonesia was a serious blow to a Dutch tradition of research in the humanities and
anthropology of the former colonies. A similar strong research tradition had not been
developed for the tiny parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Caribbean.

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Ironically though, the theoretical concept of the plural society developed in Southeast
Asia did get a modest new lease on life in the Dutch Caribbean.
So how has the concept of the plural society worked for Suriname? Van Liers
seminal study certainly dominated the field for many decades and inspired a series
of doctoral dissertations on specific groups, some of which were published or
subsequently translated into English. Only a handful of recent studies continue this
tradition of empirical research on specific ethnic communities (Carlin & Boven,
2002; Kambel, 2002). Remarkably, very few studies connect to wider anthropological
debates on gender (see, however, Wekker, 1997, 1999, 2001). Solid empirical
research covering all of the Surinamese population and explicitly aiming at probing
the shifting boundaries between and within ethnic groups was hardly undertaken.
There has been only a trickle of empirically grounded articles documenting
accommodation and prejudice between the major ethnic communities (e.g. the long
time lapse between Van Renselaar, 1963; Speckmann, 1963; and Verberk, Scheepers &
Hassankhan, 1997).
There were, and still are, valid theoretical and political reasons not to take the
plural society as a point of reference. Theoretically, there are valid objections against
an essentializing of ethnicity and ethnic divisions. In the political realm, the pessimist
implications of Furnivalls reasoning could not possibly sit well with a nation that
acquired independence in 1975 and since strives hard to maintain that ethnic division
is not a crucial issue. Unfortunately, empirical evidence points in a different direction
(Dew, 1978, 1994; Meel, 1998; Ramsoedh, 2001). There is no valid scholarly
argument to turn a blind eye to this political inconvenience.
In the 20th century, Suriname seemed to display the paradox of increasing
geographical propinquity and a fair amount of mutual understanding between the
major ethnic groups, as against increasingly divergent external orientations as well
as a mounting disparity of socio-economic trajectories, possibly at the expense of
the Afro-Surinamese lower-class population (De Bruijne, 2001; De Bruijne &
Schalkwijk, 2005). The (post)colonial state has long been remarkably successful in
mitigating the resulting tension. Yet in the recent decades of political sovereignty, the
exodus and the emergence of a transnational nation, the economic hardship and the
concomitant emergence of informal and illegal activities, ethnic pluralism may well
be regaining its crucial importance.
While there is need for fresh ethnographic work on both cultural change within
separate ethnic communities and on patterns of interaction between these, a
particularly promising line of research is to link such anthropological enquiry to the
realm of political sciences. In Furnivalls plural society, the colonial state had the task
of mitigating ethnic division. Today, in Suriname, a weak, absent or possibly failing
state with a limited capacity to control this country with immense borders and a large
illegal economy has to take up the same challenge. Hence the hypothesis that
Suriname, after moving forward to being a unitary multicultural state until the third
quarter of the 20th century, may now be upon a track of progressive disintegration
along both the ethnic and administrative dimensions. After all, if the state loses its
control over the domestic economy and if the various ethnic groups differ in their
economic performance, the state is called upon to mitigate the arising inter-ethnic

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tension, but at the same time lacks the means to do so through redistribution of
income by allocating state subsidies and jobs, as has been the practice over the past
decades.4
The Netherlands Antilles and Aruba
The six Dutch islands in the Caribbean are mainly linked by the vagaries of colonial
history and, in modern history, by inter-island migration.5 They were inserted as
a six-island autonomous country in the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1954. In 1986
Aruba attained a separate status within the Kingdom. By the end of the first decade
of the 21st century, decolonization will be completed not by the transfer of full
sovereignty but by the dismantlement of the remaining five-island Antilles in a new
arrangement in which each of these will have a direct constitutional link with the
Netherlands (Oostindie & Klinkers, 2003).
This outcome, accomplished against Dutch preferences, displays the strong
prevalence of insular political and economic interest as well as insular definitions of
national identity. Most recent research in the field of ethnicity indeed focuses on the
latter issue. There is strong continuity in the sense that studies on the Antilles have
always tended to be directed towards one island only. In practice, most scholarly
work has been done on Curacao, with a trickle of studies on Aruba and Sint Maarten
and even less on the remaining three islands, Bonaire, Saba and St Eustatius.
A truly comparative perspective has seldom characterized these island studies.
The major exception to this rule has been the influential work of Harry Hoetink.
His 1958 thesis on race relations in pre-industrial Curacao was firmly grounded in
the plural society paradigm. In his subsequent writings he preferred the concept of
segmented societies over that of plural society and introduced a pioneering
comparative perspective on slavery, race and color in the Americas, particularly the
Caribbean (Hoetink, 1967, 1973, 1985).
In these writings, Hoetink increasingly argued against the reification of race that
characterized much work done in the plural society paradigm at the time. Against
such essentialist readings, he offered comparative explanations for the divergent
meanings of race and color in the Caribbean. While he identified demographic,
economic, political, and cultural factors as determinants of the salience of ethnicity,
he did not shy away from applying a psychological approach, as in his controversial
concepts of somatic norm image and somatic distance (Oostindie, 1996).
Curacao
With Hoetinks work, the Dutch Caribbean and particularly Curacao made some
inroads in Caribbean studies. Conversely, the study of ethnicity in Curacao has
remained intimately linked to the framework laid down in his 1958 thesis. Essentially,
this study traces the development of a highly segmented colonial society through
an analysis of both the various, internally stratified constituent ethnicities the
Protestant and Jewish elites, the enslaved Africans and their descendants, the growing
intermediate colored group and the patterns of interaction between these groups.

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Subsequent work on ethnicity in Curacao was mainly published in Dutch, with

occasional short surveys in English. Noteworthy is the work of Rene Romer, who
used the concept of segmented society to the 20th-century development of Curacao
and published many articles discussing the concept of yui Ko`rsou, the emic
conceptualization of local identity (Romer, 1979, 1998; see also Eikrem, 1999, and
Oostindie, 2005). Most other researchers have focused on specific ethnic groups
rather than ethnic relations as such. While recent work includes occasional studies of
minorities, particularly the still vibrant Jewish community (Benjamin, 2002), interest
has now clearly shifted to the Afro-Curacaoan majority.
Dutch anthropologists in the 1970s had a particular interest in matrifocality. A first
generation of Curacaoan anthropologists turned to the field of Afro-Curacaoan
culture in a broader sense, as in the work of Allen (2001, 2002) on popular culture
and Rosalia (1997) on tambu. The latter studies are essentially historical studies.
There is a remarkable dearth of studies based on solid fieldwork in contemporary
Curacao linking general debates on globalization to cultural change in this island
thoroughly transformed by migration, growing economic disparities, constitutional
recolonization, and an increasing dependence on tourism and drugs-related
activities. A good exception to this observation is a recent unpublished dissertation
by Jaffe comparing lower-class attitudes on environment in Curacao and Jamaica
(Jaffe, 2006).
In spite of relative prosperity by Caribbean standards, Curacao increasingly suffers
from an economic and social crisis, as becomes clear from growing economic
disparities within the island, high dropout rates even from low-level education, high
unemployment and low employability figures, narco-related high crime rates, etc.
This crisis has not been met with sufficient governmental action, whether from
the island or from the Netherlands. The crisis has resulted in a growing number of
studies on lower-class Afro-Curacaoan culture, focusing mainly on a string of
arguably interconnected issues: matrifocality and teenage pregnancies, language
command and educational performance, employability and unemployment, drugs
and delinquency, and circular migration.
Certainly not coincidental, in view of the fact that the Netherlands has increasingly
found itself at the receiving end of this social malaise through the migration process,
most of the studies in this field are conducted from Dutch institutions by
Dutch researchers and result in Dutch-language policy-oriented publications.
Notwithstanding this wry observation, some of these studies offer extremely
interesting anthropological insights in perpetuate cultures of poverty, in the interplay
between matrifocality, heavy circular migration and crime, and in the performative
dimension of violence among Curacaoan youth (van Hulst, 1997; van San, 1998).
The Curacaoan crisis, particularly as it has translated into disproportionate
deviance in some Dutch cities, is increasingly interpreted in the Netherlands as
evidence not only of failing governance on Curacao but also of disfunctionality of
(lower-class) Curacaoan culture as such. This in turn is at times easily translated into
negative generalizations on Afro-Caribbean culture and ethnicity as such. This issue
is extremely sensitive and in the public debates one detects an essentializing of
ethnicity at times bordering on racism.

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It has taken some time before Curacaoan scholars started to bring their own views
to this discussion. A striking element that emerges in these studies is the recurrent
invocation of inheritances from the slavery period as an explanation both for anger,
existential insecurity and lack of confidence among the Afro-Curacaoan population
(Allen, Heijes & Marcha, 2003; Antonius, 1996). This approach fits into a broader
discourse on the psychological legacies of slavery as in the concept of cultural
trauma (Eyerman, 2001) which for want of a solid theoretical framework seems to
be rather more successful as an evocative than as an explanatory tool.
One explanatory element often singled out in these studies to account for poor
educational performance and the ensuing problems is the language hurdle which the
Papiamentu-speaking Curacaoans have to take both in the Antillean educational
system and in the Netherlands (there is a parallel here with the predominantly
Spanish-speaking migratory flows from postcolonial Puerto Rico to the USA).
This brings us to a last dimension of ethnicity, or rather, national identity. With
no pan-Antillean identity present or left, with an increasing Dutch presence in all
dimensions of society and culture, and with continuing strong socioeconomic and
color divides within Curacaoan society, Papiamentu serves as the one element
uniting Curacaoans and setting them apart from the rest, in particular the
Netherlands (Oostindie, 2005).
Several studies in praise of Papiamentu have been published over the years
(Martinus, 1996; Van Putte, 1999). This work, and actually all studies grounded in
fieldwork on the island or its diaspora, by definition demonstrates the pride
Curacaoans take in speaking their own unique language. Yet no serious
anthropological work has so far been published in English linking language,
educational and socioeconomic performance, and the rhetoric of ethnic or national
identity in the increasingly transnational Curacaoan community.
Finally, mention should be made of work by Haviser (2001, 2002) on Antillean
archeology and his acid analysis of the commodification of the slavery past for tourist
purposes (2002).

Aruba
While the official argumentation in favor of Arubas secession from the six-islands
Netherlands Antilles was mainly cast in a jargon of political and economic
expediency and patriachiquismo, a strong ethnic undercurrent was part and parcel of
the urge for a separate status. The Aruban political leadership and much of its rank
and file prides itself of Indian roots and of being more Latin than African, and
perceives a major contrast with Curacao in this respect. Frequent reference is thus
made to the supposedly mestizo culture characterizing the islands social fabric.
One major objection to this self-representation is the fact that a good part of the
Aruban population is in fact Afro-Caribbean, labor migrants from the Anglophone
Caribbean settled on the island since the late 1920 or their descendants. A slumbering
muted debate therefore has existed for decades on the question Ken ta Arubiano?
who is a (real) Aruban? (here, a Caribbeanist might well think of the parallels with

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the Dominican Republic, both in its positioning vis-a`-vis Haiti and in its white-andindio self-representation).
The question of the ethnic definition of the true Aruban has become even more
pronounced in the last decades, as a third wave of labor migrants, this time mainly
from Latin America, has settled on the tiny island. This observation, incidentally,
holds true for Curacao as well.
This issue of ethnicity and local identity has inspired interesting anthropological
research, unfortunately not of recent date and moreover rarely in English (Alofs &
Merkies, 1990). Why is that so? For one, Aruba has even less of a research
infrastructure than Curacao. Another explanation seems to be that the very issue is
considered a very delicate one, to the point of being off-limits for anyone living on
the island or interested in maintaining cordial relations with the Aruban elites.
Be that as it may, definitions of Aruban identity and alterations herein in response
to the changing demographic composition of the islands population remain
a challenging but under-researched subject for anthropological enquiry.
After a handful of anthropological studies on either the old Arubans or the
Anglophone immigrants published in the 1970s, very few anthropological studies
were published since. There has been an occasional study on the West Indian carnival
and the contested nature of Aruban identity (Razak, 1996, 1997), but otherwise there
is merely a void.

Sint Maarten
The island of Sint Maarten has been divided between the French and the Dutch since
the seventeenth century. Constitutionally, both halves today form part of Europe.
Economically, they are dependent primarily on tourism American (including
Puerto Rican) and only in second place European. The French governmental
presence is far more significant than the Dutch one. Because of the tourism boom,
the islands population exploded from a mere 5000 in the 1950s to some 80,000
today. The bulk of the recent migrants are from the poorer parts of the Caribbean.
At the top of the islands socioeconomic hierarchy, one finds an international jet set
made up of Americans, Europeans and Asians alike.
Sint Maarten thus is an island screaming for serious anthropological studies
on globalization and its many effects, including its repercussions for debates on
ethnicity, politics and insular identity. Again, reality is different. Extremely few
anthropological studies have been published on either half of the island (see however
Klomp, 2000, and Rummens, 1993). One recent exception is an unpublished, lively
dissertation discussing globalization, local identity and Christianity through the
prism of local DJs (Guadeloupe, 2006). As in Aruba, insular identity is a contested
issue, but while in Aruba the debates centers on the number of generations of ones
family on the island, in Sint Maarten more importance seems to be attached to the
question of ones actual contribution to the booming economy.

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Transnationalism and its Consequences

Colonialism breeds its own production of colonial knowledge, and Dutch
colonialism is no exception to this general observation. Not only did this result in
a pre-Second World War dominance of Dutch scholars studying the Dutch colonies,
but also in a virtual neglect of the small Caribbean colonies in favour of the
Dutch East Indies. Recent decades have witnessed some change in this respect
in favour of Dutch Caribbean studies, in response to both the divergent trajectories
of decolonization and the migration patterns connected to these.
Indonesia with over 200 million inhabitants, the worlds fourth largest nation in
population continues to attract significant Dutch scholarly attention, but certainly
the former metropolis does not dominate the field of Indonesian studies anymore.
Dutch Caribbean studies meanwhile have managed to carve out some institutional
space in Dutch academe. Not surprisingly, academic interest in the former Caribbean
colonies is still dominated by scholars working in the Netherlands. Here one does
witness the slow emergence of scholars with Caribbean origins. While this may help
Dutch Caribbean studies to shed its colonial origins, the wry flipside to this is that
institutional and financial opportunities for, as well as interest in anthropological
studies remain at a low level in Suriname and the Antillean islands.
With over 700,000 people living in the former colonies and over 450,000 Dutch of
(partial) Caribbean roots in the metropolis, transnationalism has arguably become
the key concept defining the Dutch Caribbean. Surprisingly, the study of this
phenomenon is only in its infancy and has produced only a trickle of publications
accessible to an international readership.
There are many promising avenues for research in this field of transnational
studies. The study of socioeconomic issues such as remittances, brain drain and
circular migrations has so far resulted in several policy-oriented reports, but
few scholarly publications (Gowricharn, 2004; Gowricharn & Schuster, 2001).
The comparison of trajectories of social mobility and political and cultural
articulation of the various Caribbean communities in the Netherlands builds on
the work done in Suriname and the Antillean islands. Again, most of this results in
Dutch-language work, with only an occasional study in English (Van Niekerk, 2002,
2004; Sansone, 1999, 2000; Sharpe, 2005). Yet another side of transnationalism is the
rediscovery of continents of origins. This is particularly evident for Hindustani
Surinamese. The study of this phenomenon is still in its infancy.
The particular postcolonial predicament resulting from the twin phenomenon
of ambivalent decolonization and the exodus begs the question whether there is
any room left for the definition of localized national or insular identities for the
increasingly bifurcated and geographically unfixed Caribbean communities
(Oostindie, 2005). The evidence seems to point in the direction of further
fragmentation of both the Dutch Caribbean and the Dutch Caribbean communities
in the Netherlands, both geographically, constitutionally and ethnically.
Perhaps postcolonial identity politics may countervail such fragmentation to some
degree. One interesting phenomenon in this respect has been the relatively successful
attempt to insert Atlantic slavery and its legacies in the agenda of debates on Dutch

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G. J. Oostindie

history and contemporary identity. An effort was made at once to address all Africanorigin citizens of both the Netherlands and the former Dutch Caribbean colonies, to
correct Dutch awareness of its own history, and to link contemporary deprivation
and conflicts to the past (Kardux, 2004; Van Stipriaan, 2001). Paradoxically, while
this endeavor may help to bridge some historical divides between Surinamese and
Antilleans of African origins, it may only underline the African-Asian divide
characteristic of the Surinamese communities.
Conclusion
With this last observation, we are back to the strong persistence of ethnic division
both within the former Dutch Caribbean colonies and among the Caribbean
communities in the Netherlands. Since the first applications of Furnivalls theories to
the West Indies, scholarly work has moved to far more dynamic conceptualizations
of ethnicity and ethnic relations. This paradigmatic shift is well exemplified by the
many dozens of studies bearing creolization in their titles. Moreover, and certainly
in the Dutch Caribbean, independence did not bring about the ethnic clashes implicit
in Furnivalls reasoning.
Even so, ethnicity and inter-ethnic relations have remained paramount markers of
the contemporary Caribbean as well as its diaspora. Again, as may have become
apparent from the above discussion of the scholarly work available in English, the
Dutch Caribbean is a point in case. Do we need to resort to Furnivalls plural society
thesis to understand the contemporary Dutch Caribbean? Definitely not, if one were
to use his work as a return to a rigid theoretical compartmentalization of these
Caribbean societies, but it would do no harm to use some of Furnivalls original
provocative work to focus our attempts to understand Dutch Caribbean
multiculturalism.
The various ethnic communities meet but do not mix, wrote Furnivall. They meet,
sure, and yes, they mix to some degree as well, but to what degree and in what
spheres and settings? In what tempi? Does the evidence point to a gradual
diminishment of the relevance of the ethnic factor, or rather to oscillations or
a renewed saliency? Is there a dominant factor underlying the changing significance
of ethnicity? Is it economic performance, demography, class, gender? What is the
impact of globalization and transnationalism? Such questions have not lost their
relevance not for the Dutch Caribbean, nor beyond. As only a few of the works
cited above address these questions upfront and systematically, there is much
interesting work to be done.
Notes
[1] I thank Rosemarijn Hoefte, Rivke Jaffe, Anouk de Koning and Henk Schulte Nordholt at the
KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies for their
comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
[2] For an exhaustive and permanently updated online bibliography on the Dutch Caribbean,
see www.kitlv.nl 4 Catalogues 4 Bibliography of the Netherlands Caribbean.
[3] See his definition of the segmented society in Hoetink (1967, p. 97).

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[4] From 2005 through 2008, the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and
Caribbean Studies in Leiden houses a research project departing from this hypothesis (see
www.kitlv.nl).
[5] One of the islands, St Martin, is actually half French, half Dutch. With the development of
the oil refineries in Aruba and Curacao from the 1920s, significant numbers of Windwards
Antilleans migrated there, and most of these migrants and their families eventually settled
there for good. In the 1980s, St Martins tourist boom broke this pattern, attracting many
migrants from Curacao to settle in this Windwards island.

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Gert J. Oostindie is at the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean
Studies, P.O. Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands (Email: oostindie@kitlv.nl).