Managing Island Life
edited by Jonathan Skinner and Mils Hills
(Dundee: University of Abertay Press, 2006)
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Managing Island Life
Social, Economic and Political Dimensions of Formality and Informality in ‘Island’ Communities
Introduction: Jonathan Skinner (The Queen’s University Belfast)
Introducing Islands.
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Section 1: Conceiving Islands
1) Nigel Rapport (University of Concordia)
No Suburb is an Island, Every Intellectual is an Island: The Story of Bobby O’Malley.
2) Cathy Di Domenico (University of Abertay Dundee) & Maria-Laura Di Domenico (University of Cambridge)
A Metaphorical island: The Expatriate Community in Ibadan, Nigeria.
3) Sue Lewis (University of St. Andrews)
‘Web of Significance’: Perceiving an Island Through a Network of Images and Texts.
Section 2: Social Islands
4) Tamara Kohn (University of Melbourne)
Imagining Islands.
5) Margaret Taylor (London School of Economics)
Island Dreams and Disillusions: Travellers and Migrants in New Caledonia.
6) Nicolette Bethel (Ministry of Culture, Bahamas)
The Archipelago: A Study in Insularity versus Cosmopolitanism.
Section 3: Economic Islands
7) Huon Wardle (University of St. Andrews)
Marshy’s ‘Fish and Bammy’: Informality, Deformalisation and Island Experience.
8) Mathew Donaghy (University of Liverpool)
Formality and Informality in Offshore Financial Centres: Some Tentative Findings.
Section 4: Political Islands
9) Mils Hills (AnalyticRed)
The Formal and Informal Management of Diversity in Mauritius.
10) Andy Dawson & Nerys Roberts (University of Melbourne & UK Government)
Island Politics in Nationalist Communities: Orthodox Greeks and Protestant Irish compared.
11) Andy Samuel (University of Abertay-Dundee)
Island Life in Scotland Contextualised.
Topic and Rationale
“The formal framework of social, economic and political power exists alongside or intermingled with various other kinds of informal structures which are interstitial, supplementary or parallel to it.”
So wrote Eric Wolf about the complexity of societies under study in the social sciences (1966: 2). As editors of this volume, with direct island research in island communities (Montserrat and Mauritius), we maintain that islands, for the social sciences, are neither theoretical nor empirical backwaters and that - to continue along Wolf’s vein - even on islands, ‘informal groupings cling to the formal structure like barnacles to a rusty ship’ (1966: 2). By citing Wolf, we mean to argue that informal systems are a necessary adjunct to formal systems. Indeed, we go further by adding that the two go hand-in-hand, the former as a mortar sustaining the structure of the latter. So, when considering islands past and present, near and far, from the literal to the metaphoric to the comparative, we have encouraged contributors to this volume to present their material in ways which consider how formal relations and organisations are maintained by informal mechanisms.
Wolf was looking at how kinship, friendship or patron-client relations might function within commercial corporate organisations. This volume, ‘Managing Island Life’, sets out to examine the relationship between formality and informality in social, economic and political contexts in ‘island’ communities. Despite this remit, we have neither produced a structuralist’s volume of forced dichotomies, nor a volume which treats islands as uniform monoliths. Islands can be as diverse as the range of barriers (reefs, rocks and sands) about them; just as the variety of lifestyles on an island can also vary immensely. A key inspiration for this volume has been Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s article - ‘In which sense do cultural islands exist?’ - which looks at the island as a metaphor, how islands are conceptualised and how they have been used to connote isolation, uniqueness and difference, particularly against recent globalisation processes (1993; see also Hindmarsh 1996).
‘Is the world an archipelago of cultures?’ asks Eriksen in another article (1993: 142), a question which depends upon relativity and perspective (143, 144). For us, islands - both metaphoric and literal - are archipelagos of hope, imaginative places where theory engages with practice and practice engages with theory. With our open approach to the conceptualisation of islands (cognitive, virtual and metaphoric) in the first section of this volume (Conceiving Islands), this volume aims to extend the traditional political and regional course of island studies taken by Dommen’s and Hein’s landmark volume States, Microstates and islands (1985) and the territorial and strategic line of enquiry initiated by Burton Benedict in Problems of Smaller Territories (1967).
Subsequent sections in our volume fit in with the more expansive work contained in African Islands and Enclaves, edited by Robin Cohen (1983) and which included locations such as St Helena, The Seychelles, Angola’s oil enclave of Cabinda and The Gambia. Where we are more extensive than previous work in this new field of island studies is both in the range of our examples (Atlantic - Pacific - Indian Oceans, Caribbean - North Seas), and in our attention to formality and informality, a divide which resonates with Eriksen’s distinction between formal and informal nationalism. The formal connected with the demands of the nation-state (with bureaucracy, ideology and political consensus) and the informal identified in collective events, such as ritual celebrations and sporting competitions, which occur in civil society (1993: 1). So too, perhaps, with Peter Wilson’s distinction between ‘respectability’ and ‘reputation’ in the West Indies: the former a local response to colonial dependence, the latter a summation of colonial dependence (Mintz in Wilson 1973: x).
The second section, Social Islands, turns from the realm of the conceptual to that of the social and cultural; from island spaces in the mind, and on the Internet, to island places and their effects upon the people inhabiting them. The Bahamas are islands of migration and diaspora, for example, with some 225,000 miles of sea between all the islands. In this case, island places have profound implications upon islanders’ identity and behaviour. But this is not just the case for locals, as the other chapters in the section consider short and long term visitors to islands - tourists and incomers.
Thirdly, the volume turns to Economic Islands. This section examines the increasingly inevitable incorporation of island economies in the global economy. Examples here demonstrate the vigour of both formal and informal economies: between the new semi-regulated Offshore Financial Centres in air-conditioned skyscrapers, an ‘informal economy’ continues to operate amongst old personal networks of street vendors. In Jamaica, the transnational nature of these informal networks shows us the true potential of their stake in the global political economy, and the need for sociological and anthropological approaches to economic and political issues.
The last section in this volume, Political Islands, strengthens the methodological arguments made in the previous section, illustrating the strength of anthropological comparison - whether it be ethnic groups on Mauritius, national integrity amongst Greek and Irish farming communities, or the diverse and disputed management of Scottish island ecologies. In sum, it can be concluded from the chapters in the final section of this book (concerning land and people management), as well as in the preceding chapters, that informal mechanisms on all types of ‘islands’ are more than just complementary responses to the formal. On a cautionary note, this volume ends by having shown that informal activities are in fact an indispensable element of living and managing life on islands; without the combination of informality with formality, the ‘islands’ featured in this volume would dry up and become deserted, as - indeed - some have in the past.