ABSTRACT
The recent florescence of the creolization concept can be explained in a number of ways. As colonial projects, Caribbean societies have tended to treat creolization as a central problematic, construed not simply as a natural, unmarked process of cultural development but as an object of cultural derailing, one that produces certain kinds of ambiguous, disruptive embodied consequences. Class factors produce an impasse that most discussions of creolization miss or ignore: creolization is neither the template for a society's achieving social, cultural, and political equality nor the harbinger of discord. Although Melville Herskovits surely did not view it in these terms, one might argue that, the energy of creolization is implicitly located in the force of abrasion, that is, the contrariness of opposites together but not much attracting. If the plural society model was unable to accommodate cultural and social change over time, its poor fit for creolization models lay the necessary antinomy among different norms and values.
