ABSTRACT
D. Ethnic groups such as the Portuguese, Chinese and East Indians, which do not fit readily into the colour/class hierarchy, are able to infiltrate at all levels and to take over special functions where ~ relative lack of status-consciousness is an advantage, particularly in the retail and distributive trades. The development of a separate collectivity, primarily oriented towards a function implying the predominance of economic achievement, such as business enterprise, competition and efficiency, really conflicts with ascribed membership of groups, and it would seem to have been fortuitous that these ethnic groups came from societies where there was already a tradition of trading, shop keeping, money-lending and so on. The market nexus of petty trading in British Guiana is interstitial to the ascriptively based social groupings -but it has not· developed very far towards becoming organized, or forming a primary focus of attention for the ordering of social relations, and in any case the larger scale marketing operations have been controlled by the higher status ethnic groups. The very multiplicity of operators in the lowest level of the marketing system (especially vendors of garden produce, fruits, etc.), is an indication of the tendency to spread the functions and prevent specialization from developing to a point where it would
conflict with the ascribed low status of the operators. One special feature of a differentiated group in market operations is the necessity for 'affective neutrality', and this could most readily be found in the Chinese and Portuguese groups, where all other sections of the population did in fact regard them as being neutral in terms of the scale of colour values, and the symbolism connected with it (I).
