on transformations

48) misuse of transformation--Joyner

49) transformation instantaneous and continuous

55) transformation continual and instantaneous-- M&P, Kopytoff

56) transformations mental, not spatio-temporal

61) spatio-temporal transformations and pristine past

57) Kulikoff's description resembles pidg/cre dif

58) Transformations as answer to retentions as general or trivial

59) Transformation as locus of culture-specific info

60) cultural transformations--'making sense'

48) misuse of transformation--Joyner

Charles Joyner's Down By the Riverside is a typical example of a paradigm used by historians. He posits a model of creolization based on an eclectic group of sources from anthropologists to historians to linguists. In doing so he re-interprets and misunderstands the linguistic idea of a "transformation" outlined above when he applies it to cultural change. He claims that culture is a process and that viewing "continuities between Africa and Afro-American cultures in terms of transformations rather than survivals runs parallel to recent linguists' understanding of the creolization process in language."{ Joyner, 246-7, notes 10 and 12.}

49) transformation instantaneous and continuous

The linguistic process of transformation is not one of change on a culture-wide level through time from one generation or continent to the next, but rather from deep structure to surface manifestation within the individual. It is at this level that cultures are actually formed and changed.

55) transformation continual and instantaneous-- M&P, Kopytoff

What is significant in the approaches which Mintz and Price and Kopytoff take (as opposed to the one they espouse--i.e. getting at underlying forms) is that in fact what they are studying is not an underlying form discrete to any particular culture--the belief in the divine significance of unusual births is not a particularly African feature, as it can also be found in the puritan diarists of seventeenth century England (I am not positing England as the source though!).{ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971, 90-107.} What is culturally identifiable is the transformation of that general underlying belief into a unique surface structure every time that the ritual was enacted. The insight of the linguist is that this process of transformation is not a once-and-done, external thing, but rather an internally repeated component of the expression.

56) transformations mental, not spatio-temporal

The transformations took place not between Africa and the new world--the continents did not change--but rather within the individuals who came over, and also within those who did not.

61) spatio-temporal transformations and pristine past

The use of the concept of transformation between one time and place and another is misleading. In the case of African cultures in the Americas, such a transformation requires the assumption of an ideal and pristine Africa of the past containing various ethnicities isolate from each other and outside contact. Africans had--and used--the tools with which to reach across ethnic cultural barriers before the arrival of Europeans. Trade languages levelled differences between related language groups for the achievement of specific ends. In addition, many if not most Africans were multilingual, often knowing their own language plus a lingua franca and maybe a few neighboring languages as well. Extensive trade networks and social hierarchies were already in existence before the arrival of Europeans. Contact with Europeans extended rather than introduced this ability for cross-cultural representation and communication.

57) Kulikoff's description resembles pidg/cre dif

Conflicts and division marked the first years of slavery as African and native-born slaves came into contention on such matters as marriage and religion. Conflicts were diverse and depended on the individuals involved. This process, analogous to the pidginization stage, gave way after about 1740 to a process of creolization, in which these individualistic responses to cultural differences gave way to a more stable form of community as African immigration into the Chesapeake began to decline and natural increase became the primary means of sustaining the slave population. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 328-346; ________, "Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and Virginia, 1700-1790," WMQ, (April 1978), 35:2, 245-246.}

58) Transformations as answer to retentions as general or trivial

Africanisms are almost invariably either too widely distributed to be considered as distinguishing features or too specific to generalize from. A solution to this quandary lies in the concept of transformation. Mintz and Price conceive of transformations as a process which has taken place through time and space--from underlying, pristine sets of identifiably African values and beliefs into a new forms of culture which take into account the exigencies, limits and histories of specific American slave communities. Although this definition of transformation has proven useful in describing African-American cultural formation with ever increasing sophistication and accuracy, description can only tell what something is, not how it works. The Mintz-Price model remains frustratingly incapable of adequately explaining how underlying values and beliefs can be transformed into specifically African-American cultures in a way that is distinctively African.{1For the descriptive/explanatory distinction as used in the domain of language, see Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965, 25-27. }

59) Transformation as locus of culture-specific info

Generative linguists have long been exploring the concept of transformation from a different perspective, one which explains much about Liverpool Butler's ability to reach across continents and centuries. This transformation, in the domain of language, is the means by which individuals externally represent their internal mental constructs of the world they live in. An individual can transform internal ideas, values, beliefs and perceptions into expression in any number of ways. But in order for this externalized representation to be understood by an audience, the "speech community," it must be generated in a way which has been to some extent determined beforehand by all involved. Linguistic transformations are thus culturally determined or conditioned by past and present intended audiences. On the other hand, underlying structures (internal representations) tend toward universal distribution, and surface expressions (actual utterances), even while being conditioned by transformations, are potentially infinite.

--sources: Derek Bickerton, "Creole Languages," Scientific American, 249:1, July 1983, 116-121 provides a capsule summary of the most salient points of generative/transformational grammar in an article on his model of creolization, which informs the theoretical framework of this paper throughout. For an more technical update of theories of generative grammar, as well as a model of language as representation rather than simply as a form of communication, see Bickerton's, Language and Species, University of Chicago Press, 1990, passim. For alternative models, as well as other linguistic tools of potential use to historians, refer to Ronald Wardaugh, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986. It is accessibly written and contains an extensive bibliography. }

60) cultural transformations--'making sense'

Culture, like language, can also be treated as a means by which individuals transform internal representations into shareable expressions. Ethnically diverse African slaves who were brought to the Americas each had to change their own internal set of transformations in a manner which allowed them to represent themselves and be understood within a new context--that of American slavery. Such cultural transformations, like their linguistic analogs, are not between one time and place and another, but between internal and external representations. Such transformations take place in the course of representing oneself externally. Whether under the constraints of an old African society or a new American one, these transformations are the tools by which a person literally 'makes sense' of their world.