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A So Black People Stay: Bad‐mind, Sufferation, and Discourses of Race and Unity in a Jamaican Craft Market
Author(s) -
Lewis Jovan Scott
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the journal of latin american and caribbean anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.624
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1935-4940
pISSN - 1935-4932
DOI - 10.1111/jlca.12111
Subject(s) - craft , framing (construction) , normative , citizenship , trope (literature) , sociology , construct (python library) , race (biology) , context (archaeology) , gender studies , political science , law , politics , art , history , visual arts , literature , archaeology , programming language , computer science
Craft vendors in St. James, Jamaica, interpret the competive strategies of fellow vendors as acts of animosity understood through the trope “bad‐mind.” Despite facing a marketplace increasingly constricted by foreign‐made souvenirs imported by emigrant Sindhi Indian wholesalers, vendors attribute their economic failings and the conditions that create them to a chronic black Jamaican disunity inherited from slavery. In this context, vendors reconcile their limited prospects and normative expectation of failure through the rationale of “sufferation,” a notion broadly availed within Jamaican society, to contextualize and rationalize economic adversity. What emerges is an ethnicized framing of the market as a construct through which inferences of citizenship and racial discourses are produced.