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celebrating cricket: the symbolic construction of Caribbean politics
Author(s) -
MANNING FRANK E.
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1981.8.3.02a00120
Subject(s) - cricket , politics , carnivalesque , context (archaeology) , sociology , romance , the symbolic , reflexivity , gender studies , history , aesthetics , anthropology , literature , art , political science , archaeology , psychology , law , ecology , psychoanalysis , biology
Cricket festivals are Bermuda's major public celebrations, aside from Christmas. This paper examines their social history, their carnivalesque character, and a prominent ancillary activity, gambling. It is proposed that these festivals symbolically depict both a reflexive, assertive sense of black culture and a stark awareness of black economic dependency on whites—a dramatic tension that is also the semantic context of Bermudian politics. Festival is thus a metaphorical map of the political system, a contention that appears generalizable to the Caribbean. [festival, politics, cricket, Caribbean, symbolic/cognitive analysis]