The artist Carl Abrahams and the cosmopolitan work of centring and peripheralizing the self

Winner of the 2013 J.B. Donne Essay Prize.The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and 'citizen of the world' Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a 'technology of enchantment', and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams own weltkenntnis, or world knowledge as its focus. The weltkenntnis of an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self-expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams' claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralising himself in colonial and post-colonial Jamaica.PostprintPeer reviewe

Times of the self in Kingston, Jamaica

Revival Zionists – a small spiritist following in Jamaica – describe how their relations with spirits allow them to bring personal spiritual gifts to bear on every day or ‘temporal’ experience. Taking a hint from Kant that ‘time itself does not change but only something which is in time’, the article considers the timely logic of these ‘gifts’. In a social-economic situation characterised by paucity of material resources but plenitude of labour-time, spiritual gifts reappear as a valued ground for a person's reputation. Likewise, we may also see them as one example of an attempt to organise the relationship between homo noumenon and homo temporalis.PostprintPeer reviewe

Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Han F. Vermeulen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 746 pp.

Vermeulen shows that the expansive moment of ethnography and ethnology was the 1740s, and the scholars involved were Germans who worked in and on peoples in the Russian empire. This was the period in which the keywords ethnographia (or völker-beschreibung) as the description of peoples and ethnologie as the comparison of peoples or nations acquired its technical status as a kind of scientific inquiry in its own right, and began to be complexified into distinct subtypes with varied methodological directions.PostprintPeer reviewe

Computing fast and accurate convolutions

The analysis of data often models random components as a sum of in- dependent random variables (RVs). These RVs are often assumed to be lattice-valued, either implied by the problem or for computational efficiency. Thus, such analysis typically requires computing, or, more commonly, ap- proximating a portion of the distribution of that sum. Computing the underlying distribution without approximations falls un- der the area of exact tests. These are becoming more popular with continuing increases in both computing power and the size of data sets. For the RVs above, exactly computing the underlying distribution is done via a convolu- tion of their probability mass functions, which reduces to convolving pairs of non-negative vectors. This is conceptually simple, but practical implementations must care- fully consider both speed and accuracy. Such implementations fall prey to the round-off error inherent to floating point arithmetic, risking large rela- tive errors in computed results. There are two main existing algorithms for computing convolutions of vectors: naive convolution (NC) has small bounds on the relative error of each element of the result but has quadratic runtime; while Fast Fourier Transform-based convolution (FFT-C) has almost linear runtime but does not control the relative error of each element, due to the accumulation of round-off error. This essay introduces two novel algorithms for these problems: aFFT-C for computing convolution of two non-negative vectors, and sisFFT for com- puting p-values of sums of independent and identically-distributed lattice- valued RVs. Through a rigorous analysis of round-off error and its accumula- tion, both aFFT-C and sisFFT provide control of the relative error similar to NC, but are typically closer in speed to FFT-C by careful use of FFT-based convolutions and by aggressively discarding irrelevant values. Both accuracy and performance are demonstrated empirically with a variety of examples

‘Characters… stamped upon the mind’. On the a priority of character in the Caribbean everyday

‘Character’ was a key term in the early development of Anthropology as a discipline – Kant gives over the entire last section of his Anthropology to refining the idea of character as a ‘way of thinking’. Perhaps inevitably, however, its ideological career since then – as the mark of a kind, or type of person – has been highly ambivalent. In the Caribbean, though, the idiosyncratic biographical gaze has loomed large. This article explores the status of character in an urban Caribbean everyday, where the demonstration of character through ‘talkover’ has profound social effects. Where does character come from? And what is its futurity in a social setting where no one can lay claim to autochthony, yet where ‘gifts’ are foundational to the ‘respect’ someone can command? Character belongs partly to the past as ‘a priority’, partly to the future as utopian protention.PostprintPeer reviewe

Testing freedom : ontological considerations

Who or what can be free, or not free? The question may seem mind-boggling on close inspection. To the extent that meaning is defined through reference, or acts of naming, different meanings of freedom deployed in daily life derive their significance from specific and contingent instructions that allow the particularities of freedom to be constituted. So we must begin by exposing ourselves to what Malinowski called the ‘universe of semantic chaos’ in which ‘freedom’ appears if we are to hope to approach freedom itself (1947). Further, this article argues that in order to address the complexities of freedom to their limits, an exploration not only of semantics (considerations of meaning) but also of its relation to ontology (considerations of existence) cannot be neglected.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

‘Windrush generation’ and ‘hostile environment’ : symbols and lived experiences in Caribbean migration to the UK

The Windrush scandal belongs to a much longer arc of Caribbean-British transmigration, forced and free. The genesis of the scandal can be found in the post–World War II period, when Caribbean migration was at first strongly encouraged and then increasingly harshly constrained. This reflection traces the effects of these changes as they were experienced in the lives of individuals and families. In the Caribbean this recent scandal is understood as extending the longer history of colonial relations between Britain and the Caribbean and as a further reason to demand reparations for slavery. Experiences of the Windrush generation recall the limbo dance of the middle passage; the dancer moves under a bar that is gradually lowered until a mere slit remains.PostprintPeer reviewe

Introduction : testing freedom

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