Course Point on Jean-Luc Bonniol’s work : « la couleur comme maléfice »

Introduction

This is my presentation of Jean-Luc Bonniol’s work, “La Couleur Comme Maléfice”, and I will make some more general comments on the race issue in Latin America.

Bonniol is an anthropologist who teaches in Marseille. In different works he has studied the case of the French Antilles, focusing for instance on genealogy in order to better understand the evolution of social facts from one generation to another.

Why did he choose this title?

He once heard about a legend claiming that in the XV° century, some witches wanted to condemn the human race and consequently decided that from now on, the social status would be determined by the color of the skin. This curse meant that for a portion of the population, inferiority would self-reproduce throughout time, with no possibility of achieving a higher rank in the social hierarchy. What was supposed to be just a biological fact (skin color) would then become a social one (social status).

What methodology does he use?

His study concerns mainly the French Antilles but he also tries to develop some more general theories that could apply to other cases (such as Brazil or the United States). In fact, the areas he studies have all been concerned by slavery. Therefore, his work contains a historical approach : he is interested in the evolution of social phenomena in these societies from the XVIII° to the XX° century.

Main hypothesis and objectives

Bonniol wants to understand how the parallelism between social inequality (a cultural fact) and the color variations (a biological fact) established itself through the centuries. At first the link between these two factors was guided by socio-economic reasons, known as the “plantation economy” during slavery (in order for one man to control hundreds of slaves it was necessary to make them believe they belonged to an inferior race conceived to serve the white land owners). Some analysts thought that the color prejudice would disappear with the abolition of slavery, but it did not.

That is what Bonniol tries to explain : how the link between the two factors (mentioned above) survived the particular context of the plantation economies.

The race mixture process

First, he highlights the fact that these societies have all known race mixture (hybridation). This phenomenon appears when two groups of population meet. What are the possible results of this encounter? There are two main possibilities : (1) a new group is created, different from that of the two parents. This happened for instance in South Africa with the “coloured” people category. In this case, the process ends up with 3 groups. (2) Even after the mixture, you still end up with two groups. In this case the original dichotomy is maintained. This means that the mixed population is excluded from one group and assimilated to the other one. This happened in the societies which have known slavery, the ones Bonniol studies.

The color line

In this case (preservation of the dichotomy), you get what Bonniol calls a color line. This is one of his work’s key concepts. This line separates the White men from all the rest, the “non-white”. This line may be more or less strict, but exists everywhere. Its function is to isolate one group (only the pure white, or the pure white + the light skin color, etc…) in order to ensure its reproduction from generation to generation. Bonniol tries to explain how it works concretely by taking the examples of three white groups and trying to see how the frontier separating these groups from the rest of the population is determined. His examples are the Martinique’s “Békés”, the Caribbean’s “Petits Blancs” and the Grande-Terre of Guadeloupe’s “Blancs-Matignon”. He explains that all the latter are characterized by a strong endogamy forbidding marriages outside the group. Generally, there is more tolerance towards men (allowed to have illegitimate relationships outside the group) but a woman is strongly forbidden to have any such relationship with a non-white.

A strong polarity

The societies he studies are strongly polarized. They are characterized by the encounter of different groups and cultural values (European, African, Indigenous, Asiatic). Some of these cultural elements have been valorized whereas others denigrated, forming a pyramid, at the top of which are the European ones. The polarization process ends up with strong prejudices against the black color. For an anthropologist, they are observable for example in the proverbs reflecting the enduring stereotypes (commonly the assimilation between the black color and the fact of being lazy, having bad manners etc…).

The internalization of the polarity

To explain the fact that the process which assimilates a Black man to an inferior person has managed to survive for centuries, many anthropologists insist in the internalization of the prejudice by the black population itself. One of the most convincing approach has been to analyze how some people try to achieve a higher status by changing the color of their skin. This is due to the parallelism existing between social levels and chromatic levels (in some societies, anthropologists have counted dozens of color variations in the popular lexicon : for example in Haiti, you can hear about blue-black, coal-black, pink black, red-black, brown, reddish brown, etc…). This forms what Bonniol calls a continuum : on one hand there are the different chromatic levels (going from white to black), and on the other the different social status (from a high position to a low one), with a connection between these two.

Therefore, individuals use the chromatic differences to obtain a higher status in society. The best example of this phenomenon can be observed through the choice of the spouse. Choosing a partner becomes a strategy, and one often tries to avoid “blacker” than oneself. In this perspective, marriage becomes an investment, especially for the following generation (according to the belief that by marrying someone “whiter” than me, my children will get a chance to achieve a higher social status). The connection between “whitening” and social or economic success has been assimilated in such societies.

Also, there is a possible compensation between the “racial position” and the “class position”. Having money can change your color, as illustrated by this Antilles’ proverb : “tou mulat pov sé nèg, tou nèg rich sé mulat” (a poor mulatto is a nigger, and a rich nigger is a mulatto).

Emilio Piriz

DEA de Science politique compare