"In this innovative work, Browne pierces the silence that has hidden the world of creole economics in the
literature on the Antilles. The men's social world of creoleness has been much written about. But the ways that
creoleness infuses everyday economic life, the ways that these practices that were built up in resistance (first
to slavery, later to colonialism) actually operate, has never before been laid bare. A fine example of how anthropology
still has something original to teach us."
--Richard Price, Dittman Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and History at the College of William
& Mary
Publisher Web Site, April 2005
Summary
What do the trickster Rabbit, slave descendants, off-the-books economies, and French citizens have to do with
each other? Plenty, says Katherine Browne in her anthropological investigation of the informal economy in the Caribbean
island of Martinique. She begins with a question: Why, after more than three hundred years as colonial subjects
of France, did the residents of Martinique opt in 1946 to integrate fully with France, the very nation that had
enslaved their ancestors? The author suggests that the choice to decline sovereignty reflects the same clear-headed
opportunism that defines successful, crafty, and illicit entrepreneurs who work off the books in Martinique today.
Browne draws on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork and interview data from all socioeconomic sectors to question
the common understanding of informal economies as culture-free, survival strategies of the poor. Anchoring her
own insights to longer historical and literary views, the author shows how adaptations of cunning have been reinforced
since the days of plantation slavery. These adaptations occur, not in spite of French economic and political control,
but rather because of it. Powered by the "essential tensions" of maintaining French and Creole identities,
the practice of creole economics provides both assertion of and refuge from the difficulties of being dark-skinned
and French.
This powerful ethnographic study shows how local economic meanings and plural identities help explain work off
the books. Like creole language and music, creole economics expresses an irreducibly complex blend of historical,
contemporary, and cultural influences.