JAMAICAN ADVENTURES: SIMMEL,
SUBJECTIVITY AND
EXTRATERRITORIALITY IN THE
CARIBBEAN.
by HUON WARDLE
As one of the key theorists of modernity, Simmel's writing remains strikingly underrepresented in
recent anthropological theorizations of this subject. Drawing on Simmel's conception of adventure, this
article considers the ways in which a sense of agency is created by working-class Jamaicans through
their presentation of self in narrative. Adventure, as an aesthetic framing of individual experience,
provides a temporal and spatial modality in which the individuated self can be reshaped into a
protagonistic subjectivity for others. At the same time, the adventure presents a vehicle for an
exploration of the meaning of freedom in a cosmopolitan field of social relations. The article examines
the affinity that exists between the conditions for adventure, as Simmel outlines them, and the
political-economic circumstances that govern Jamaican lives.
Sidney Mintz's recent overview of the Caribbean region (1996) reminds us once again of the features
that have, in the past, given this zone an anomalous status in anthropology. Together, slavery the
plantation economy, colonialism and labour migration enforced a precocious and violent exposure to
modernity for Caribbean peoples. [1] These factors also lent themselves to the region's vibrant social
and cultural heterogeneity. Much attention has been paid by anthropologists both to this wider socialhistorical picture and to the varied modes of cultural expression that have emerged from it.
In this article I take Caribbean individuals as my point of focus. [2] I ask how it is that Caribbeans
come to construct and perceive themselves as agents in the social and cultural field of modernity and
how this sense of agency is developed and reproduced. My analysis centres on the relationship
between human movement and subjective imagining and I leave to one side here the varied claims
that Caribbean people make to cultural rootedness and localized identity (Mintz & Price 1985).
Instead, the article draws on one of the chief theorists of modernity, Georg Simmel (1965 [1911]), in
order to place a particular aesthetic form, the adventurous episode, within the social-historical
narrative that Mintz and others have laid out (cfTrouillot 1992). Adventure', I will argue, speaks to a
recognizable organization of imaginative resources within a context shaped to a great degree by
migration and social and cultural open-endedness. Most significantly, for the working-class Jamaicans
discussed here, adventure provid es a concrete-metaphorical framework through which to explore the
meaning of freedom. [3]
Anthropologists have described extensively the structure of movement that is embedded in Caribbean
life. In the 1960s and 1970s Philpott (1968; 1973) argued that we could hardly understand Caribbean
society except through the networks of foreign migration that supported it: Caribbean social structure
is not isomorphic with the Caribbean as a region. [4] In the 1980s, Drummond (1980), drawing on
Brathwaite (1971) and Bickerton (1975), extended that notion to the sphere of culture. Caribbean
culture, he argued, was best seen as a 'continuum', as open-ended rather than holistic: there was a
need to investigate the ways individuals mediated, and made coherent, their manifold, often
conflicting, cultural experiences (see also Drummond 1996: 76-88).
While identification with locality is clearly evident in the Caribbean, ThomasHope (1978; 1995) has
indicated how central movement is to Caribbean definitions of freedom. Despite the disillusionment
that actual migration often brings, it remains a powerful cultural ideal. Extending Philpott's insights,
Olwig (1993: 206) and Basch et al. (1994) have shown that Caribbeans find themselves caught up in,
and 'deterritorialized' by, inter-generational social networks that overlap the boundaries, and
ideologies of inclusivity, of nation states. Involvement in migrant networks affects both how actors
understand social relations (Foner 1978; Olwig 1987) and also the strategies for economic viability
that they deploy (Besson 1987a: 121; Griffith 1985; Segal 1997). [5] It is necessary then to
comprehend Caribbean culture-building and patterns of movement within regional (Patterson 1986),
global (Klak 1997) and historical frameworks (Richardson 1982; 1992).
If social scientists have shown the open-ended nature of Caribbean society and culture,
anthropologists such as Mintz (1960; 1971; 1996) and Wilson (1969; 1973; see also Besson 1993)
have made clear how it is individuality or sociality-centred-in-personality that forms the cultural centre
of gravity in this context. In Mintz's account, extensive individuation (due to the exigencies of
plantation labour) and the formation of networks of dyadic relationships are a fundamental feature of
Caribbean life. In Wilson's ethnography, it is through personal, usually oral, performance that the
cultural relations of the wider colonial society are evoked and contested (see also Abrahams 1983;
Burton 1997; Cooper 1993; Hebdige 1987). Hence, models which stress the individual and those
which emphasize personality may give us two viewpoints on the same phenomenon. What this article
contributes to these debates is an exploration of the kinds of cosmopolitan subjectivities that assert
themselves within the continuum of Caribb ean social relations.
Increasing economic informalization and frequent migration dictate that most working-class Jamaicans
are engaged by necessity in broad webs of support, including rural and foreign-based kin, workmates,
former and current bosses, political patrons, neighbours, sexual partners and friends from the bar or
the street corner (Austin 1984; Comitas 1973). While they depend on these relations for a livelihood,
people in east Kingston, my fieldwork area, also often portray them as claustrophobic, and describe as
individuating the frequent fissures created in relationships by movement. In response, men and
women emphasize the need for personal autonomy and the struggle for self-assertion that widespread
social conflict, and an unstable political situation, demand. [6] Very often, this requirement for
'proving character' (Austin 1984: 231) takes the form of 'competitive dramatization' (Abrahams 1983:
143).
In what follows, I explore the process of establishing selfhood within a cosmopolitan framework of
social relations, concentrating in particular on one significant expressive modality through which the
experience of individuation can be seen to instigate the assertion of personality. The crux of this
article lies in the ways in which working-class Jamaicans shape their autobiographical experience into
a form that corresponds strikingly with Simmel's delineation of adventure. I focus on a range of
accounts where a kind of flight into another imaginative realm is thematically central or where, to use
Simmel's (1965 [1911]: 246) term, a type of 'extraterritoriality' lies at the core. In doing so, I expose
the relationship between adventure as a form of narrative and the political-economic situation in which
Jamaicans find themselves. What these examples share is an interweaving of physical movement and
imaginative migration. Revisiting Simmel's analysis, I investigate these narratives for what they tell us
abou t the relation of self to others, time and space. Moving beyond Simmel's argument, I suggest
that the importance of the adventure, as a form of self-expression, lies in its potential for shifting
between real and metaphorical contexts of deterritorialization.
The structure of adventure
Simmel is the theorist of cosmopolitan sociality par excellence. For that reason it is surprising that his
writing is so under-represented in current theoretical discussions of modernity, transnationalism and
globalization (Frisby 1997). Throughout his work Simmel engages with the kinds of agency that people
create in response to rapidly shifting fields of action and experience in the global metropolis (Simmel
1964; 1965 [1911]; 1997; see Levine 1991). A sense of agency is developed by way of a multiplicity
of imaginative frameworks amongst which is the understanding of life as an 'adventure'. Simmel
conceives of adventure as a genre that becomes significant, where a particular kind of relationship
exists between subjects and the field of social relations in which they are active.
Simmel is concerned with the relationship of adventure to everyday experience: adventures are
episodes which exist at a distance from everyday life because they are removed from ordinary
temporality and causality. Whereas everyday experience seems entangled in conflicting webs of causal
entailment, adventures have definite beginnings and ends and their protagonists seem to act
according to a unique mixture of fate and chance. One of the defining features of adventure is, then,
this 'extraterritoriality with respect to the continuity of life' (Simmel 1965 [1911]: 246), the
separation between normal life and adventure.
As a type, the adventurer works within time constraints which differ from those of the everyday He is
an 'extreme example of the ahistorical individual ... On the one hand, he is not determined by any
past ... nor, on the other hand, does the future exist for him' (Simmel 1965 [1911]: 245). What is
beyond the adventure is of little significance: the adventure contains its own self-sufficient and
essential meanings. The 'extraterritoriality' of the adventure, outside the flow of life, parallels the
displacement of the self into the adventure. The self of adventures is different from the everyday self
and in certain ways more true to the protagonist's essential personality. In this respect, the
characteristics of adventure give rise to a number of comparisons with roles similar to the
adventurer's: the gambler, the artist, the religious ecstatic.
The similarity with the gambler lies in the way contingency becomes part of the meaning of the event.
The gambler insists on the magical patterns governing chance while, for the adventurer, the accident
that gives rise to the adventure is forcibly coupled with the fateful necessity of events and the
protagonist's role. On the other hand, comparison with the artist lies in the form of the adventure.
Both the artist and the adventurer cut out and shape 'a piece of the endlessly continuous sequences of
perceived experience ... giving it a self-sufficient form' (Simmel 1965 [1911]: 245). As with types of
religious experience, in adventure there exists a sense that 'earthly' consciousness is only 'an isolated
fragment' of an unknowable essence, a 'higher unity' (1965 [1911]: 247). There is also a dreamlike or
visionary quality at work: 'the more "adventurous" an adventure, that is, the more it realizes its idea,
the more "dreamlike" it becomes in our memory' (1965 [1911]: 244).
Adventure then, in Simmel's formulation, shares something with other social roles and categories of
aesthetic experience. [7] Nonetheless, as a category, it draws within itself specific configurations of
imagination and self-knowledge. As we have seen, these characteristics include a metaphorical
displacement of the self into the arena of adventure, the condensation of experience within an
ahistorical and self-sufficient causal logic, and the feeling that in the adventure an essential self has
been realized, even if only momentarily. Through these frameworks adventure sets the adventurer
apart from others, as protagonist rather than simple experiencer. We should not, however, forget that
adventure is also a species of narrative into which listeners can, potentially, transpose themselves
imaginatively, and that fact is at the heart of the successful telling of an adventure. Perhaps it is also
true that, even if it is never recounted, an adventure is always something shaped for the fascination of
others. As Si mmel (1965 [1911]: 243) argues, the peculiarity of adventure is that it represents 'a
foreign body in our existence which is somehow connected to the center'. In the next section, I focus
on a dialogue from Jamaica, showing how the symbolic 'extraterritoriality' Simmel sees as the essence
of adventure has taken on a very literal meaning within Caribbean imagining.
'The feeling of flying'
Lee W. lives a precarious existence as a house painter and odd-job man in Kingston. He was born into
a large extended family in the rural Blue Mountains in 1952. From the age of 14 he migrated widely
around the island, from Annotto Bay in the north, to the violent impoverished ghettos of Central
Village and Riverton City, witnessing the murderous political rivalries of the l980s. From there he
arrived in east Kingston, already home to an older brother and sister. Throughout his life Lee has
depended on an extensive network of family and friendship for economic survival. While many of his
relatives have remained in the countryside, several have emigrated abroad, including a sister who
lives in England. She visits periodically with her children, and the gifts and stories that she brings with
her are eagerly anticipated. For economic reasons, but also for imaginative ones, it is a source of
disappointment to Lee that he has never been able to emigrate and to 'see things over there in
foreign' for himself. He oft en talks of his life in terms of its lost chances and indignities, but he also
contests his situation with burlesque comedy and fantasy. In particular, Lee reacts by reshaping his
own experience as a kind of adventure.
On a Monday in August 1992, Lee and two other Kingstonian friends, Music-man and Marshy, were
high in the hills of St Elizabeth in central Jamaica, hard at work on the foundation trench of a house
they were helping to construct for Marshy's mother. The house was being built with the economic
assistance of Jay, one of Marshy's daughters. Jay had lived in England most of her life but, in her
twenties, she was now trying to re-establish contact with her Jamaican family, in particular her
grandmother. There was much talk amongst the friends about Jay's visit and her new role in the
family's affairs. With the group was Mas Robert, an elderly goatherd from across the valley, who,
standing on the boundary wall, entertained the workers with stories from the Bible, tales of buried
treasure and in citing pseudo-Roman epithets.
Now it was time for lunch. In the heat of the afternoon, Lee sat on a stump and conversed excitedly
with Robert on the 'spirit journey', their experiences of magical flight. Lee talked about his dreams of
flight and how his father had a book that prophesied that these things would come true, but the book
was lost when a member of Lee's family took it abroad. Robert had also experienced the 'feeling of
flying':
LEE: Enough time me vision say me are fly y'know, and my father tell me say 'boy one day it will
come' ...
ROBERT: Are you pass spirit you know ...
LEE: Fly past the sea, an just go in, go in, straight to foreign y'know; and when me land me see a
bright bundle are ... 'im something resemble gold ...
ROBERT: Me say you see everything; spirit - spirit journey - fly you are fly man ...
LEE: And my father read my planet man and later days coming up, me are go wealthy or wha' ... true
man...
ROBERT: you see ...
LEE: Did have a book y'know: Ca a lady did borrow it - are my family y'know. It are miss up, an gone
'way a foreign and we no get it back ... [8]
ROBERT: So life man ... that is the feeling of flying man; you pass spirit ...
LEE: True man ... one day, one day ...
It is possible to treat Lee's dream of flight both at an auto-biographical level and as a universal theme
imminent in the human imagination. Likewise, we know that the image he calls on here, of flight to a
foreign place and a bundle of gold at the journey's end, has particular salience for people in the
Caribbean, where leaving to go to 'foreign' is so central to cultural and economic aspirations. McDaniel
(1990; 1998) points to another dimension: she argues that, before emancipation, the image of
magical flight made concrete the slave's dream of a return to Africa and continues to exist as a marker
of Afro-centricity in Caribbean culture.
Africa does not feature prominently in Lee's personal iconography, but that is not to say that the
imaginative structure of salvation through displacement, initiated by the slave situation, is not
reiterated in his dream narrative. There are good reasons why this might be so, as I explain in the
next section. As for many of his Kingstonian friends, for Lee the concept of 'foreign' exists as a reality
in terms of the friends and family who have visited and who live there. But it is also a concrete
metaphor for freedom from current circumstances, personified in figures such as Lee's sister or
Marshy's daughter Jay. I argue that we should see Lee's account as a universal theme, localized within
the context of Caribbean history, but nonetheless made subjective through his particular social
situation, which includes movement, and the aspiration for movement, as central referents.
My aim then is to locate Lee's narrative of flight amongst a multiplicity of imaginative frameworks for
'extraterritoriality' in Caribbean life and to do so by drawing on the framework laid out by Simmel. In
the case of Lee's description we may be talking less, to use Simmel's (1965 [1911]: 244) words,
about the 'dreamlike' quality of adventure than about the 'adventurelike' quality of dream. [9]
However, the structure of the account follows the form of Simmel's adventure in quite clear ways.
Flight has a beginning and a rewarding end, arrival in 'foreign' and a bundle of gold, and the
displacement, the metaphorical 'extraterritoriality' of adventure, is here literally present: in flying, Lee
and Robert achieve a sensational (in both meanings of the word) escape from the everyday world.
Significantly also, Lee contrasts the everyday facts of migration -- a member of his family leaving for
'foreign' -- with his personal imaginative flight: the disappointment caused by the lady taking the
dream book away with her is woven into Lee's own aspirations for spiritual-real departure.
Lee's story belongs to a type of Jamaican narrative which emphasizes the literalness of an
'extraterritoriality' that, for Simmel, is a metaphorical quality of adventures. In these Jamaican
adventures, extraterritoriality, displacement into an alien framework of human and physical relations,
is a concrete factor around which spiritual values are played out. The social relations involved in
migration continuously re-emerge in the imaginative relations of adventure, and vice versa. In Lee's
dream, adventure also provides the grounds for an exploration of the meaning of freedom and
constraint, and it is this exploration that runs to the heart of the cosmopolitan and individualistic
experience of modernity for working-class Jamaicans such as Lee. In the next section I give a wider
historical and social context to this theme, re-examining its imaginative significance and showing how
the adventure provides an arena for relocating the self in relation to others.
Roaming Jamaicans: movement and freedom
Mintz (1996) has argued that Caribbean people were modern even before Europeans. Transported into
an alien geography emptied of indigenes, individuated by the socio-economics of colonialism, only
through a complex reformulation could Caribbeans have recourse to the kinds of mythic narratives
that would express the relationship of people to a landscape. For many, rapidly-changing work
opportunities, in particular frequent migration, meant and mean a continuously moving spatial
background for the comprehension and expression of self. There are, of course, Caribbean narratives
that describe forms of rootedness in attachments to family and land (Dance 1985; Tanna 1984; see
also Besson 1987a: 116-17). Nonetheless, I want to suggest that adventure has become a primary
vehicle for the placing of self in relation to shifting social networks. The a historical nature of Simmel's
adventurer has a strong affinity with the way individual experience is shaped by Caribbean sociality.
This is certainly true in Jamaica, where , out of the historical necessity for movement, a whole
imaginative reconfiguration has taken place.
Thomas-Hope (1995: 161) shows how the realization of freedom after slave emancipation in the
Caribbean necessitated a complete 'reorientation of self in place'. The freedom of ex-slaves to sell
their labour was combined with a determination not to strike a bargain with former plantation owners.
Two intermeshing strategies emerged. One was the establishment of free peasant farms in the island
hinterland on the basis of pre-existing slave farming potential (Besson 1987b; 1992; Carnegie 1987;
Mintz 1974). The other was external migration. Immediately after emancipation Jamaicans began to
migrate, first to central America, particularly to Panama, then to the United States. So movement
became part of the concrete enactment of freedom for former slaves, despite the fact that it also
brought with it new exploitative relations. There rapidly developed a continuum of social relationships
linking the rural interior, the migrant's 'country', with emigrant destinations in the cities or 'in foreign',
a continuum re-estab lished over time through circular transmigration (Basch et al. 1994; Besson
1987a: 121; Olwig 1993: 206; Philpott 1968). As they moved, Jamaicans were forced to renegotiate
their own place within shifting networks of relationships, and I suggest that adventure became a key
narrative form in that renegotiation.
One central moment in this linking of movement to a teleology of freedom is the 1920s and 1930s,
when a popular Jamaican nationalism developed against the background of the collapse in the global
economy and its devastating effects on the colonial periphery. Most importantly, the 1920s saw the
emergence of a charismatic popular leader of international significance, Marcus Garvey. The theme of
movement as a route to liberation was fundamental and recurrent in Garvey's political thinking. Like
almost all the West Indian charismatic figures of the period -- including the radical preacher Alexander
Bedward and the Rastafarian leader Leonard Howell [10] -- Garvey had experienced migration at first
hand (Burton 1997: 123). It is striking how successfully he grasped a strand of Jamaican experience
and imagination that had existed since emancipation and which continues to exist up to the present
connecting, as we have seen, the fact of migration with the aspiration for freedom.
In the early 1920s Garvey was involved in putting on a series of spectacular dramas in Kingston. One
of these, shown to an extremely popular response in Edelweiss Park, was the epic 'Roaming
Jamaicans'. From the bills for this play it becomes clear that Garvey's drama works with one of the
key motifs of Jamaican imagining with great panache:
A Grand Repetition of the Plays for Jamaicans
A live human drama
entitled
Roaming Jamaicans
Six acts, twenty one scenes
written by the celebrated playwright
Marcus Garvey
author of
The Coronation of an African King
and Slavery from Hut to Mansion.
...
This great play depicts the life of Jamaicans preparing to leave for America, Colon, Port Limon, Bocas
del Toro, Nicaragua, Honduras and countries of South and Central America: and their manner of living
abroad and their return. This will be a wonderful education for the people. Eighty characters in the
play staged under the personal direction of the Hon. Marcus Garvey. See the life in Colon, see the
things done in Port Limon and New York.
Come and hear the conversation between Florence Green and Henry Williams, two typical characters
in Colon.
Come and see West Indians arrested in New York for drinking a bottle of J Wray and Nephew's Rum,
Come and see a Gardener Boy from Jamaica making love to his mistress in America. You can't miss
this drama that has so much information for you.
Curtain rises at 8 sharp.
This play was a wonderful success last Monday and Tuesday nights. A repetition is asked for. General
Admission one shilling (Hamilton 1987: 24)
As in epic films of the period, Garvey captures the essence of an experience through a montage of
multiple, interwoven, scenes. Particularly striking, though, is the contemporaneous quality of this
interweaving: the spectacle is built up of events happening in widely disparate places at the same
time, and it is left to the viewer to build a context out of this montage. The condensation of the
experience of these everyman adventurers -- Florence Green, Henry 'Williams -- into a sequence of
triumphant episodes in dispersed locations finds an immediate point of affinity with Jamaican modes of
self-representation. The success of the play depended not only on Jamaicans recognizing themselves
as protagonists in the drama of everyday migration, but also on their gaining a sense of the common
adventure in which they were part and of the way in which they played a distinctive role on the global
stage.
Garvey's play gives us another perspective on the wider context of imaginative expressions like Lee's
dream of flight, demonstrating in particular how such accounts are tied, as Thomas-Hope shows, into
an attempt to understand and to achieve freedom. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his capacity to
capture the concrete experience of displacement within the form of adventure, Garvey, like Bedward
before him, was credited by many Caribbeans with the ability to fly (McDaniel 1990: 37).
A clear dialectic exists between concrete and imaginative dimensions of displacement and, as I have
explained, these give shape to an ideology of freedom through the modality of adventure. Adventure
reshapes the spatial and temporal experience of migration within its imaginative parameters,
repositioning the Caribbean individual as an agent in relation to these processes. In the next section I
return to the level of individual experience and imagination, examining how religious sensibility, in
play with the experience of individuation and the contingencies of migration, provides a fertile ground
for the adventure form.
Displacement, gnosis and self-knowledge
A characteristic feature of the Caribbean is its vast number of churches and the rivalry that exists
between their leaders (Besson 1993: 24-5). The other side of that coin is the personalist and gnostic
approach that ordinary people very often take to religion, whereby formalized ritual is far less valued
than personal religious vision. An extraordinary example of that is the autobiography of the
charismatic Grenadian faith healer Norman Paul (in Smith 1963). Paul provides the classic instance of
the Caribbean whose highly idiographic religious understanding -- based in a series of revelatory
events in Grenada, the Dutch Antilles and Trinidad -- is deeply intertwined with his migrant
experience. The account ranges across a working life in those islands during the political and economic
chaos of the interwar years, a failed marriage, his experience of physical and spiritual affliction and his
final success as a healer. The story mirrors some of the grand-scale themes presented in Garvey's
play, and there are e choes of Lee's vision of flight, as when Paul describes the dreams that led up to
his migration to Aruba:
One night I dreamt I was walking the road, and a large amount of bees flew around me, and stang me
through my ears, my nose and so on. I was so frightened. The next day, relating it to a friend of mine,
he told me it was prosperity. And another time, before 1927, I dreamt I was walking on the
Hampstead estate and I got to a plum-tree that was blacked on the leaves and everything; and I told
him again, and he said 'that is prosperity coming and not long'. And my brother came in 1927 from
Maracaibo and he took me to Aruba. And while I was travelling to Aruba, several nights on the boat I
would dream of a large amount of shell corn, and I told him, he said, well, I would be very prosperous
where I was going (Smith 1963: 53).
The experience of migration is an individuating one in which the capacity to take on any task and to
rely on oneself become paramount virtues: that is the context in which Paul's account constantly
reformulates itself The sense in which the struggle with chance is a permanent feature of the
migrant's experience is made clear in Paul's description of another trip ten years later:
I left here [Grenada] with one pants during that strike in Trinidad in 1937. When everybody landed in
Trinidad they were sent back. I consulted the captain of the vessel, he managed to get me on one of
the buses. I left here, one pants, one jacket, one merino, and more than that one shilling in my
pocket after I bought my passage. One shilling. The bus charge a shilling from Port-of-Spain to San
Fernando, and I paid a shilling for a drop in San Fernando that morning. As soon as I drop I met
somebody I knew in Carriacou, and he took me home. And when I related what happened, well, they
helped me out for the week and I went to find a job (Smith 1963: 66).
Like Lee's dream of flight, fate in the form of movement is pitted against adverse luck, and the
insistence of destiny reflects and reverses the imponder-ability of migrant life. And we have seen that
the individuation that migrancy brings about does not create the grounds for non-belief: Paul's
account suggests the reverse, that a strong sense of a higher meaning to personal experience grows
out of the encounter with extreme imponderability. Paul is able to reformulate the contingencies of
movement as religious-symbolic elements in an encompassing personal narrative woven through a
sequence of
adventures. Once again, the interpenetration of migration and its imaginative reformulation around
the central image of 'extraterritoriality' provides a groundwork for 'proving character' (Austin 1984:
231). What Paul's account adds, though, is the clear sense in which the elements of his personal
narrative are reshaped from chance connexions within a cosmopolitan field of social relations and
communication.
From individuation to personality
Norman Paul's account shows, in detail, how a gnostic religious sense is brought to bear on the
experiences of displacement and contingency. Below I present three excerpts from a conversation
between myself and an artist, Leonard Daley.
Daley, like Paul, is a master of the autobiographical genre. His style is highly personal, creative,
idiosyncratic, but the mode of exposition -- its probings, overturnings and rhetorical reversals -- are
common to Caribbean forms of expression, as is the element of 'competitive dramatization' (Abrahams
1983: 231). [11] The characteristic of Daley's discourse is knowledge of self poised against the world.
Central to adventure, as we have seen, is the triumph over the chance qualities of personal adversity
and, thereby, the increased sense of an underlying spiritual teleology at work. It is in the realm of
adventure that the individuated self gives onto a protagonistic personality.
Like my friend Lee, who was present on this occasion, Daley has lived in many parts of the island and
his stories take movement as a given: Lee and Daley immediately established a rapport discussing
their network of shared acquaintances. In the conversation recorded here Daley draws on a series of
experiences from his everyday life -- arriving in a new location, a conversation at a party -- shaping
each one into an epiphanic event which he then trawls for revelatory meaning.
LEONARD DALEY: When I came in this area and mark on my shirt back from a man [12] - I don't
read, I never been to a school for reading, no, I never write a letter from me born neither do I read
one (uses past tense then corrects himself), or read one I should say. Now look, I ask a guy over
there-so if he can read and he say 'yeh'.
I say 'mark on this shirt back "I Am Sorrow"'. -you know anybody like sorrow? you know anybody like
sorrow?
LEE: Uhhn (negatively).
LEONARD DALEY: Look what is sorrow man, eh! you don't know anybody like it, but where joy come
from?! Question ask again: where you get joy from? Without sorrow where you get any damn joy
from?
'I Am Sorrow': The words form a locus around which revolves Daley's arrival in a new place, his
anonymity his illiteracy and the role of an unknown man in writing out an identity for him on the back
of his shirt. The phrase has the weight of sublime finality about it, but it also becomes the vehicle for
a further exploration of Manichaean forces, Sorrow and Joy. Here we have an event, an episode, an
epiphany, an adventure which fulfils many of the criteria discussed by Simmel: it has its own internal
logic, its own constraints of time and place; it displaces the individual into a new field of relationships
which become the locus of a process of self-understanding, self-actualization. From within these
parameters the individual emerges as the agent of his own destiny.
Moreover, in Daley's account the religious and aesthetic qualities that Simmel links with adventure are
trenchantly mixed. Further, the gnostic elements that are a broad feature of this kind of discourse are
worked through by Daley extremely deeply, even by Jamaican standards. In the second of these
excerpts, he uncovers a new persona; this time not as 'Sorrow' but as a 'Professional Cleaner of Filth',
a role which has a distinctly Socratic ring to it.
LD: I am just a servant, anyway you see, of people. The other day I was at a party in New Kingston
and a brother come and ask me what's my profession.
I say, 'I'm a Professional Filth Cleaner'.
And he laughed and laughed and laughed. But if you are not a professional man you are fuck-up-outthe-road - you smell frowzy. I'm a Professional Cleaner of Filth and I clean all my children too. Its the
same with my dirt. What's the shame about that?...
I create nastiness, you know. But you must create ... because when I spit it's nasty to somebody. If
my eyes stay a way, mouth stay a way it nasty to somebody, nose running it nasty to somebody, and
it's really nasty to me that see it.
(Laughter).
LD: So I can't ... I'm just nasty - anything you call me - what you could call me? Yesterday I put
money upon a painting - upon a crow ... [13].
HW: John Crow [vulture]?
LD: That bird -John Crow. Its a symbol of me - it cleans place.
HW: True.
LD: Cleans Place. It don't dirty place. It don't trouble people.
HW: True.
LD: No ... That bird. But they call it 'Nasty'.
Again, Daley uses an autobiographical episode to explore a series of paradoxes and mysteries
concerning the relation of self to the world: immersion in filth is also immersion in truth, the revelation
of dirt is also the revelation of hope. New Kingston is amongst the newest and richest districts in the
city. Daley is one of the 'intuitive' painters whose work is shown nationally, and this gives him unusual
access to the world of the Jamaican elites. Though he does not specify, it is almost certain that he is
here describing a private view of paintings and that his interlocutor belongs to the educated middle
class. In that context, Daley's projection of himself as a 'Professional Filth Cleaner' is razor sharp,
though his addressee seems unaware of it. Daley's identification with the misunderstood vulture
displaces him from others, those who call the bird nasty but also gives him a particular vantage point
on everyday experience.
The third excerpt comes directly after another autobiographical episode. In it, Daley has described
how a girlfriend had protected her house against robbers with a series of locked grills: but he tells her
that such a procedure is useless since it is 'the one you love that is the thief'. Here he changes tack
again, reinforcing the idea of an almost monad-like self poised against the world.
LD: So you can't get away from judgement. I bring it ... to get justice. You know I don't want a man
to know me by my name.
HW: hmm.
LD: Away from ... The name that you give brother D - my name is Leonard G Daley (G stand for
George) - its not my name; its not my name; its what my parents request.
LEE: Truth - so you just work off of that.
LD: Eeh - work off of that. Now they go and they register the baby. The register not right. Not Right.
I ask a question: 'out of the baby and the birth certificate which one is before the other?'
LEE: The baby?
LD: Then how the birth certificate for be right? Hhm. No one in this world knows who he is. Its
impossible for you to know who you are...
LEE: Just are guess ...
In this account, and it has been intimated in the earlier excerpts, the self exists as an essence quite
independent of accepted contexts, other people's actions, even one's own beliefs. Knowledge of this
self involves progress through a series of condensed, in a sense timeless, revelatory experiences. The
feeling that an aporea exists between the essential, eternal self and the often contradictory statuses
ascribed to the individual in the everyday takes us back to Simmel once again. The real self can never
be known in the everyday: it is the adventure or the epiphany that reveals aspects of it, if only in a
mysterious and Delphic way. But, of course, besides giving him a unique vantage point on everyday
reality, Daley's adventures provide him with a particular personality with regard to his audience: this
is because, paradoxically, out of the experience of placelessness and identity-lessness, the adventure
gives him a space and a role, the space of adventure and the role of protagonist.
Conclusion
'When we have no home but merely temporary asylum on earth', suggests Simmel, 'this is only a
variant of the general feeling that life is an adventure' (1965 [1911]: 248). I do not claim that the
adventure as a mode of cultural expression is unique to Jamaica. Similarly, I do not argue that
adventure excludes all other narrative genres: there are other stories in Jamaican life that speak of
longstanding attachments; to territory, for instance (Besson 1987a: 116-17). I have, however,
suggested that adventure, as Simmel outlines it, has a strong affinity with the forces shaping the lives
of individual Jamaicans and that it is a useful concept in the process of understanding how these
cosmopolitans reshape a self around the real and metaphorical ground of displacement. Out of the
array of aesthetic forms through which individuals organize their experience of the world, adventure
comes to the fore for understandable reasons.
Philpott (1968; 1973) has shown us that Caribbean social structure is founded, politically and
economically, in the dispersing and reaggregating forces of migration. Drummond (1980) indicates the
open-ended nature of a Caribbean cultural continuum made up of many overlapping and often
contradictory discourses which actors work through, mediate and make coherent. In different ways,
Lewis (1968), Mintz (1971; 1996) and Wilson (1969; 1973) have demonstrated the significance of
individuality or personality as the social and cultural centre of gravity in response to pre- and postemancipation colonial power. Within these theoretical parameters I have given an account of the place
of adventure in the self-presentation of the Jamaicans that I have worked with.
Exceptionally violent, with an ineffectual political apparatus prone to authoritarianism, a faltering
economy and high migration rates, Jamaica exaggerates some key facets of Caribbean social
experience (Austin-Broos 1996; Edie 1990; Harrison 1997). In a context that is highly individuating,
the adventure plays a key role in the process which Thomas-Hope (1995: 161) describes as
'reorientation of self in place'. The search for freedom through migration which Thomas-Hope points to
at the macroscopic level is pivotal also in individuals' imaginings of their self's relation to others.
Displacement into adventure not only enables the emergence of a kind of protagonistic personality it
also creates a framework through which the individual can explore and, perhaps, make real the
meaning of freedom. The ahistorical nature of adventure matches the momentary character of
people's connexions with each other: the imaginative displacement central to adventure mirrors a
practical experience of movement. But the form of t he adventure works to frame the protagonist's
relationship to these qualities within a higher unity, a fateful collusion between luck and chance, and is
unbounded in its potential for creative elaboration.
Pursuing arguments made by Bruner (1996), Carrithers has recently pointed to the ways that people
'confabulate society using stories' (1995: 275). Carrithers also suggests that 'there can be no minimal
definition of what constitutes a narrative' (1995: 267-8). I think that, as Simmel argues, adventure
contains a consistently recognizable mix of form and content, even if elements of that mix are shared
with other aesthetic kinds. We can see Simmel's adventure and these Jamaican dreams and stories as
partaking of a particular Judaeo-Christian worldview. We can also understand accounts like Lee's
dream of flight in Eliadian terms as reflecting more universal cognitive patterns (Eliade 1970), or as
'liminoid' experiences producing particular results for the subject (Turner 1974). My purpose here has
been to examine the way a specific narrative modality has been put to work in a given politicaleconomic context.
Once again, Jamaicans are not unique in having adventures: it is the way in which adventure comes to
the fore in relation to, for instance, myth, artistic appreciation, or ritual, that is significant. Myth may
contain adventure-like qualities, but its emphasis is on the validating role of the past rather than
ahistorical validation via the immediate. Similarly, disinterested artistic appreciation may have a
totalizing role for the individual, but the kind of sensibility constructed out of the relationship between
self and art object contrasts radically with the protagonism of adventure. In ritual, formalization far
outweighs contingency. All of these forms merge into each other at particular points on the aesthetic
matrix; each of them provides the potential, reflexive grounds from which can emerge certain kinds of
subjectivity -- ritualistic, connoisseurial, protagonistic; one or other of these forms may predominate
within particular contexts of experience. The heightened individuation experienced by many J
amaicans is a fertile ground for a heightened sense of self-as-protagonist, self-as-adventurer. There is
a forceful cohesion between the deterritoriality engendered in the lives of Caribbean people and the
extraterritoriality reworked imaginatively in their self-expression. And the life construed in terms of
adventure reproduces particular understandings of self in place and time, self in relation to others.
Importantly, the success of an adventure as a narrative lies in the capacity of listeners to place
themselves within its framework. Paradoxically, the greater the displacement involved in the
adventure, the more the listener wishes to enter into it as a vicarious protagonist. The adventure
thereby creates social relations by providing the temporal and spatial parameters for imaginative
relations. That is one significant reason why the adventure works so well as a mode of expression in a
dispersed, cosmopolitan milieu: the ahistorical, immediate logic of adventure is available even where a
shared landscape and shared meanings may not be. [14] Towards the end of his essay, Simmel (1965
[1911]: 257) reflects that 'none of us could live one day if we did not treat that which is incalculable
as calculable, if we did not entrust our strength with what it still cannot achieve by itself but only by
its enigmatic co-operation with the powers of fate'. By that token, the more predictable the context of
our lives, the smaller the role that adventure has to play. Ordinary Jamaicans still live amidst some of
the most unpredictable and harsh social conditions in the world. The capacity of adventure to bring
together 'the fragmentary materials given us from the outside and the consistent meaning of life
developed from within' (Simmel 1965 [1911]: 247) assures it a central place in Jamaican selfexpression.
NOTES
I thank especially Paloma Gay y Blasco, David Riches, Joanna Overing, Nigel Rapport, Keith Hart and
two unnamed reviewers for their helpful comments.
(1.) The arguments for the Caribbean as an exemplary case of modernity extend a long way back in
Caribbean social theory, particularly to the work of C.L.R. James (e.g. 1963). James's MarxistHegelian synthesis has had a widespread influence on later commentators (e.g. Miller 1994).
(2.) The emphasis here is on subjective experience. For a discussion of the ways in which individuality
allows for communal solidarity see Wardle (1995).
(3.) The two detailed accounts included here come from Jamaican men. I chose to work from tape
transcripts in order to focus on the qualities of spoken utterance, and the dialogues with Lee and
Leonard Daley provided the two most coherent and trenchant examples captured on tape. Jamaican
women also migrate and I have collected a range of evidence to show that they also draw on the
adventure form and exploit it to the full. The fact that the materials presented come from men should
not then be taken as representative of a gender imbalance in Jamaican discourse itself I have explored
women's experiences and narratives of migration elsewhere (Wardle 1998).
(4.) Since the 1840s Jamaica has been at the forefront of these migration processes. In the early
1980s the island had the highest legal immigration to the US of any state per capita (Grasmuck &
Pessar 1991: 22). During the 1980s, 10 per cent. of the island's population emigrated to the US and
Canada (De Souza 1997: 230), so it is unlikely that any working-class Jamaican individual or extended
family is unaffected by migration.
(5.) While the Jamaican economy has declined since the 1970s (Harrison 1997), migration, with its
potential for creating and reproducing personalized economic linkages, has been a pre-eminent force
in sustaining the informal sector.
(6.) The struggle for limited resources combined with ineffectual but nonetheless repressive political
control has resulted in Jamaica, specifically Kingston, becoming one of the world's most violent civil
societies (Calathes 1990; Lacey 1977; World Bank 1997).
(7.) Compare Simmel's adventure with Dewey's account of 'an experience' (1934; see also Wardle
1995).
(8.) We had a book but a lady borrowed it - a member of my family. The book was lost; taken abroad,
and we never gut it back'. Lee emphasizes the fact that it was all the more disappointing to lose the
book because it was a member of his family that took it away. One could expect better from one's
own family.
(9.) In themselves dreams have a major significance in Caribbean life as a revelation of personal
potential. Jamaicans continuously assess their day-to-day life chances against a reading of their
dreams, especially in the choices involved in betting games. However, as will become apparent, my
concern here is not with dreams as such but with the way certain dreams are presented as adventure.
I have heard several accounts of magical flight from Jamaicans. What comes across most strongly is
that this is a personal gift or capacity: certain activities, such as murder, are sometimes explained by
the individual having been 'haunted' by a ghost; that is not the case with magical flight.
(10.) Though there is limited space to discuss it here, the influence of Garvey's 'Back to Africa'
philosophy in the formation of Rastafarian beliefs in the 1920s and 1930s is well documented (AustinBroos 1997: 192-3; Barrett 1977; Chevannes 1994).
(11.) These kinds of reversals of meaning, particularly regarding moral implication, and personified in
the mythic activities of Anansi the Trickster, are an omnipresent motif in Caribbean discourse (e.g.
Burton 1997; Manning 1973). Austin-Broos (1997: 141) makes an important argument for the role of
'the trick' as a pivotal idiom in Jamaican religious conversion.
(12.) 'When I came to this area a man marked on the back of my shirt ...'
(13.) 'I spent money (on materials) for a painting of a vulture'.
(14.) As one reader of an earlier version of this article points out, a key location in which adventure
comes to the fore currently is in dance-hall music: songs typically describe a self poised heroically
against an unrelenting world, and there is, once again, frequent reference to travel to New York,
London or Toronto as a self-validating framework (Cooper 1993; Stolzoff 1997)
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Aventures de Jamaique: Simmel, la subjectivite et l'extra-territorialite dans les Caraibes
Resume
L'oeuvre de Simmel, bien qu'il soit l'un des principaux theoriciens de la modernite, continue etre
singulierement mal representee dans les debats theoriques sur le sujet en anthropologie. S'inspirant
de la conception de l'aventure de Simmel, cet article considere les moyens par lesquels les
Jamaiquains de classe ouvriere creent une impression d'action lorsqu'ils se representent eux-memes
dans leurs recits. L'aventure, en tant que cadre esthetique de l'experience individuelle, offre une
modalite temporelle et spatiale dans laquelle le sujet individualise peut se remodeler dans une
subjectivite de protagoniste envers les autres. En meme temps, l'aventure presente un vehicule pour
explorer la signification de la liberte dans un champ cosmopolite de relations sociales. Cet article
examine l'affinite qui existe entre les conditions de l'aventure, telles que Simmel les esquisse, et les
circonstances politiques et economiques qui gouvernent la vie des Jamaiquains.
Dept of Social Anthropology, Queen's University, Belfast, NI BT7 1NN.
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