Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an

Ac­cord­ing to po­lit­i­cal his­to­ri­an Bene­dict An­der­son, the na­tion is an "imag­ined com­mu­ni­ty." An idea. It is imag­ined be­cause most of its mem­bers and cit­i­zens will nev­er meet each oth­er, yet each mem­ber has an idea that fel­low mem­bers are out there. How is the na­tion imag­ined?

Well, there are var­i­ous mech­a­nisms and de­vices that help us imag­ine the bound­aries of this imag­ined com­mu­ni­ty. These in­clude our pass­ports, the na­tion­al an­them, lo­cal mon­e­tary notes and coinage, our flag, na­tion­al mu­se­ums, and maps, among oth­er things. Oth­er de­vices are more ba­nal and in­clude a lo­cal di­alect like non-Stan­dard Eng­lish, buy­ing a lo­cal na­tion­al news­pa­per, lo­cal forms of knowl­edge, and tun­ing in every morn­ing and evening to the na­tion­al TV news.

For An­der­son, such de­vices help us imag­ine our­selves as part of a larg­er com­mu­ni­ty of sim­i­lar in­di­vid­u­als. He goes on to say this imag­ined com­mu­ni­ty cre­ates hor­i­zon­tal feel­ings of deep com­rade­ship and broth­er­hood, which are at the heart of na­tion­al­ist pol­i­tics.An­oth­er de­vice that helps cit­i­zens imag­ine them­selves as part of a na­tion is a na­tion­al cen­sus. It's use and choice of iden­ti­ty cat­e­gories cre­ates a par­tic­u­lar vi­sion of so­cial re­al­i­ty. Our most re­cent cen­sus un­der­tak­en in 2011 was re­leased last week and it pro­vides a good ex­am­ple of how a cen­sus shapes the na­tion­al imag­i­na­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to the cen­sus, T&T is di­vid­ed eth­ni­cal­ly in­to 11 dif­fer­ent groups: East In­di­an (35.43 per cent), African (34.22 per cent), Mixed-Oth­er (15.16 per cent), Mixed�African and East In­di­an (7.66 per cent), Not stat­ed (6.22 per cent), Cau­casian (0.59 per cent), Chi­nese (0.30 per cent), oth­er eth­nic group (0.17 per cent), In­dige­nous (0.11 per cent) Syr­i­an/Lebanese (0.08), and Por­tuguese (0.06 per cent).

There is no men­tion on the cen­sus of the lo­cal eth­nic la­bels and mark­ers heard dur­ing the course of an av­er­age day. Cul­tur­al cat­e­gories (some more po­lit­i­cal­ly cor­rect than oth­ers) like red­man, dark­ie, Chi­nee, cre­ole, Po­to­gee, Chin­di­an, hak­wai, chi­gro, Span­ish, co­coa-pa­ny­ol, ras, dougla and many oth­ers. These la­bels aren't on the cen­sus be­cause they are folk cat­e­gories and lo­cal forms of knowl­edge. A na­tion­al cen­sus is a dif­fer­ent kind of beast. It is an ex­er­cise in po­lit­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion and na­tion­al stock­tak­ing for the mod­ern age. It isn't in­ter­est­ed in folk knowl­edge. Such stock­tak­ing is an overt form of state pow­er. A mod­ern State needs to cat­e­gorise its pop­u­la­tions to make a so­ci­ety gov­ern­able. It is a cen­tral el­e­ment of state­craft; it de­fines who has rights and who can get re­sources from the State.

Of course, that the for­mu­la­tion of cen­sus ques­tions and cat­e­gories is a po­lit­i­cal ex­er­cise is not a star­tling rev­e­la­tion. The cul­tur­al cat­e­gories on our cen­sus may have been tweaked slight­ly over the years, but the ini­tial choice of cat­e­gories stretch back to the days of colo­nial ad­min­is­tra­tion. For some cat­e­gories–like age–this is not a prob­lem, but for oth­er cat­e­gories like cul­tur­al groups, a cen­sus takes for grant­ed the ex­is­tence of the cat­e­go­ry it­self. As such, it shapes how we come to imag­ine each oth­er. It makes so­cial facts out of po­lit­i­cal cat­e­gories. In its most ba­sic terms, a cen­sus re­duces us all to one pre-de­ter­mined cul­tur­al cat­e­go­ry that we share iden­ti­cal­ly with every­one else in the cat­e­go­ry. These pre­de­ter­mined choic­es cause peo­ple to think of the na­tion as com­posed of mem­bers of var­i­ous groups. These groups are sup­pos­ed­ly time­less, pri­mor­dial and bound­ed. Cen­sus cat­e­gories de­ny that every­day life is far more sit­u­a­tion­al and that peo­ple can con­stant­ly ne­go­ti­ate their var­i­ous so­cial links by choos­ing to ac­ti­vate var­i­ous forms of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal de­pend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion and per­son. This might in­clude adopt­ing a par­tic­u­lar ac­cent and cul­tur­al be­hav­iour in or­der to deal with a par­tic­u­lar so­cial sit­u­a­tion, as takes place every day in T&T.

As the cul­tur­al crit­ic Ar­jun Ap­padu­rai once point­ed out, "Sta­tis­tics are to bod­ies and so­cial types what maps are to ter­ri­to­ries: they flat­ten and en­close."So a cen­sus seems in­ert. Harm­less. Sci­en­tif­ic. Yet a cen­sus is a lot more than sta­tis­tics about the na­tion. It con­nects the past to the present through its choice of cul­tur­al cat­e­gories. It makes cer­tain groups in­vis­i­ble, such as those of Amerindi­an her­itage, who on­ly re­cent­ly were in­clud­ed as a cat­e­go­ry. It shapes how we imag­ine our­selves–as mem­bers of bound­ed cul­tur­al cat­e­gories rather than peo­ple whose cul­tur­al knowl­edge of each oth­er is far greater and shared than in most oth­er na­tions.

Un­der­stood in this light, a cen­sus be­comes more than sim­ply in­ter­est­ing; it is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of bu­reau­crat­ic pow­er that plays a key role in the con­struc­tion of re­al­i­ty and how we as cit­i­zens come to imag­ine our na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty. It shapes us more than we shape it.

Dr Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an is an an­thro­pol­o­gist at UWI, St Au­gus­tine