David Murray presents an ethnography of
contemporary urban Martinique that casts
the problem of Caribbean colonial identity as
one of irreducible paradoxes. That ‘problem’
exists for Murray’s interlocutors as well as for
anthropological analysis; it is both data and
theory. Rather than attempting to subsume
Martinican conversations about, and practices
of, self-understanding under one theoretical
rubric, or attempting to provide analytical
closure to the ethnographic project, or
grounding ‘identity’ in any one social category
such as gender or race, Murray instead
borrows the Martinican writer Edouard
Glissant’s concepts of ‘density’ and ‘opacity’,
allowing him to leave unresolved the paradoxes
of Caribbean social worlds. Glissant’s
aim was to query the ethnographic impulse
to fix and freeze ‘the tangled nature of
lived experience’ (Glissant, in Murray, p. 15).
Murray carries this forward by arguing that
the overdetermined density of social relationships
and performances demands a mode of
analysis open to an opacity or unclarity that
would necessarily lie in the way of ‘a position
of transparent analysis’ (p. 15). Leave complexity,
contradiction, and paradox where they
fall; any attempt to ground analysis in fixed
and transparent certitudes is likely to lack
verisimilitude.