20 - The Concept of Creolization

Summary

“New creole, new god”

Jamaican Maroon proverb

In the language of the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname (descendants of rebel slaves), kióo means “young fellow” and carries implications of inventiveness and outrageous behavior – kióos are expected to do things differently from their parents' generation (whether in styles of speech, woodcarving, or dress). During the first couple of decades of Suriname's settlement, in the new language being created by plantation slaves, the equivalent term (krioro) meant “born here” (i.e., not in Africa). We may surmise that today's Saramaka connotations would have been doubly appropriate back then, when these young people – the first American-born generations – were forging new ways of speaking and much else, and teaching these “creolized” ways to their own children.

The concept of creolization – the process by which people, animals, ideas, and institutions with roots in the Old World are born, grow, and prosper in the New – moved from the field of natural history to linguistics, and thence to anthropology and history only in the course of the twentieth century. (The earliest usage in English that refers to cultural as opposed to biological processes seems to date from 1928, when Jonkeer L. C. van Panhuys, in a letter to Melville J. Herskovits, described culture change among the Suriname Maroons as “creolisation.”)