Colonial Research and the Social Sciences at the End of Empire: The West Indian Social Survey, 1944–57

Abstract

After the ending of slavery the West Indian colonies were marginalised in British imperial consciousness but the major disturbances of the 1930s jolted the complacency of colonial administrators and aroused more widespread concern over lack of development. At the same time, there was greater official recognition of the academic social sciences in formulating policies to promote colonial development and counter mounting threats to empire. This article focuses on a major study carried out in Jamaica in the late 1940s, the West Indian Social Survey, whose main brief was to research aspects of African Caribbean culture that acted as a barrier to progress. It evaluates the context, origins and conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the project, looks at problems encountered by the researchers during the survey and in publishing the findings and, finally, considers the impact of the research on academic knowledge and policy making. A key theme is the relationship between the Colonial Office, the academics on the Colonial Social Science Research Council who sponsored and supervised the project, and the research team in the field. Problems in the inception and management of the project and publication of research findings raise questions as to who were the gatekeepers of academic knowledge and how such knowledge was constructed and disseminated.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sue Donnelly, head archivist at LSE, who has helped me in my research for this article, in particularly with access to the Clarke Papers. I would also like to thank Lucasz Kaczmarek of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan who, at the time of writing this article, was researching Obrebski's fieldwork in Jamaica and provided additional information on Obrebski's life and academic career.

Notes

Other key studies include Blake, Family Structure; M. G. Smith, West Indian Family Structure; R. T. Smith, The Negro Family; Solien, ‘Household and Family in the Caribbean’; Stycos and Blake, ‘Jamaican Family Life Project’.

Sociological, anthropological and historical research from the 1930s up to the 1970s generally favoured the position taken by Frazier in The Negro Family in the United States and Henriques in Family and Colour in Jamaica that slavery had a disruptive and adverse impact on black family life. Frazier, together with the St Lucian economist Arthur Lewis—at that time a member of the LSE staff—and Audrey Richards, one of the project supervisors, visited the WISS researchers in the field. See Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me, 11.

Minutes of first meeting of Colonial Research Committee (CRC), 24 March 1947, enclosed in Firth Papers (FP), 7/2/8, London School of Economics (LSE) Archives; Firth to Margaret Read, 19 May 1941, enclosed in ibid. For general background to the structure and ethos of the LSE at this time, see Dahrendorf, History of the London School of Economics.

Carstairs, ‘Colonial Research’, 26. For general background to these developments, see Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development.

Blackburne, Lasting Legacy, 76–77. Other relevant publications relating to underdevelopment in the West Indies include Olivier, Jamaica; Stannard, The British West Indies; Thompson, Don't Forget the West Indies.

French, ‘Colonial Policy towards Women’, 39; West India Royal Commission Report.

Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, Extract from House of Commons Official Report, 4 Feb, 1949: Jamaica, 28–29, enclosed in Papers of the Colonial Research Committee (CRC), CRC (49), file 3/23, Colonial Research (CR) archive, LSE Archives. See also Mr Driberg (MP, Malden), Mr Gammers (MP, Hornsea), ibid., 5–7, 9.

Ibberson, ‘Note on the Relationship between Illegitimacy and the Birthrate’; Roberts, ‘Some Aspects of Mating and Fertility’. The most comprehensive study was by the American researchers Stycos and Back in Control of Human Fertility in Jamaica.

As advocated by Edith Clarke in a report to the CSSRC. See Minutes of the Second meeting of the CSSRC Committee on Anthropology and Sociology (A &S), 25 Oct. 1949, Papers of the Colonial Research Council (CSSRC), CSSRC (49), file 8/106, enclosed in Colonial Research (CR), LSE Archives.

See, for instance, Simey to Raymond Norris, secretary to the comptroller of WIDWO, 20 Aug. 1945, file D396/8/1, Simey Papers, Liverpool University Archives.

Simey, Welfare and Planning, x, 88–90, 182–84, 188, 238.

Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 35–38. See also Simey to Raymond Norris, 20 Aug. 1945, file D396/8/1, Simey Papers, Liverpool University Archives. Simey's claims of the ineffectiveness of WIDWO, also made by West Indian nationalists, were arguably justified. See, for instance Harris, ‘Making Leeway in the Leewards’, 393–418.

Firth to Alexander Carr Saunders, the director of the LSE, 1 July 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

According to Jack Goody, Clarke was a ‘well connected student’ who went out to the Gold Coast to carry out anthropological research (Goody, The Expansive Moment, 26). An article by an Edith Clarke, ‘The Sociological Significance of Ancestor Worship in Ashanti' was published in Africa, vol. 3, 1930.

Durham ‘Outstanding Jamaican Women Series’, Appendix 5.2; Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me; Note by Secretary [Raymond Firth], 12 Dec. 1944, CSSRC (44) enclosed in FP 7/9/2, file 1 of 3, LSE Archives. For additional biographical data, see Pat McDonnough ‘A Biographical Note on Edith Clarke’, in Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me, Appendix 5.3 and Sir Hugh Foot, Preface in ibid., 1957, 8.

Agenda and Minutes of the Second Meeting, 5 Sept.1944, CSSRC (44), file 8/1, LSE Archives.

Ibid.

The Need for Sociological Research in the West Indies. Memorandum prepared by Miss Edith Clarke, with cover letter by Firth dated 26 Oct. 1944, CSSRC (44) 22, file 8/ 22, LSE Archives.

Social Research in the West Indies. Miss E. Clarke, CSSRC (44) 30, file 8/5, LSE Archives.

Agenda and Minutes of the Fifth Meeting, 5 Dec. 1944, CSSRC (44), file 8/1, LSE Archives.

West Indies Social Research, Note by Secretary [Firth], 27 July 44, CSSRC (44) 4, file 8/2. LSE Archives. Sir Frank Arthur Stockdale (1883–1949) had started his career as a lecturer in agricultural science at the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies. He had experience in British Guiana and Ceylon where he was director of agriculture. He was co–chairman of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, 1942–45, comptroller of WIDWO, 1940–45 and an advisor on development and planning at the Colonial Office, 1954–58 (Who Was Who).

Report by Secretary Firth, Agenda and Minutes of the Fifth Meeting, 5 Dec. 1944, CSSRC (44), file 8/1, LSE Archives.

Memo by Miss E. Clarke, enclosed in CSSRC (44) 4, file 8/4, LSE Archives.

T. E. Newlin to Simey, 31 Oct. 1945; Simey to T. E. Newlin, 18 Oct.1945, Simey Papers D396/8/1, Liverpool University Archives. Simey was the external examiner on the LSE social welfare course but found it a ‘headache’ and was critical of the way it was run. He complained that the LSE, and not his own institution, Liverpool University, was sent ‘all the West Indian students’ who had been on the social welfare courses he had set up when he was in Jamaica although the LSE did not know the area or the students (Simey to Dora Ibberson, 11 and 14 Nov. 1945, Simey Papers D396/8/1).

Simey to Ibberson, 5 Aug. 1945; Ibberson to Simey, 19 Aug. 1945, Simey Papers D396/8/1, Liverpool University Archives. Simey believed it would be a ‘disaster’ if his protégé E. A. Maynier was put under Edith Clarke for research purposes but this seems never to have been proposed.

Telegram from the Governor of Jamaica to the Colonial Office, 10 April 1945, enclosed in Colonial Social Science Research Council: Social Research in the West Indies: Memorandum by the Secretary. CSSRC (45)21, file 8/9, LSE Archives.

Sociological Survey of the West Indies: Note by Colonial Office, 1 Oct. 1945, CRC (45) 195, file 3/13, LSE Archives.

Report of the Committee for the year 1946–47, CRC (47) 267, file 3/17, LSE Archives.

Report on Miss Edith Clarke's Survey by A. I. Richards on behalf of the Supervisory Committee, LSE, 13 April 1948, enclosed in Sociological Research in the West Indies, CSSRC (48) 23, file 8/13, LSE Archives.

Clarke's verbal report, Committee on Anthropology and Sociology, minutes, 25 Oct. 1949, CSSRC (49), file 8/106, LSE Archives. The historian J. G. Young was appointed to research the history of Warsop settlement. Clarke to Young, 13 May 1947, Clarke GB0097, file 131, Clarke Papers, LSE Archives. For additional details of local researchers, see Clarke Papers and names in the preface to Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me, 1999 edition.

Report on Miss Edith Clarke's Survey by A I Richards. Clarke and Kerr met with Bustamante in the bar of the Savoy Hotel, Christiana (near Mandeville), Jamaica, 18 May 1948. General Interview No. 1, file 11, Clarke Papers, LSE Archives.

District Surveys, West India Social Survey, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Report by V. D. (Vera Dantra), 8 Nov. 1948, file 5, Clarke Papers, LSE Archives. See also Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica, Appendix 1, ‘Field Technique’, 209.

Female Jamaican correspondent to ‘Doctor’ and ‘Miss Vera’, Golden Grove, 1 Jan. 1949, file 75, Clarke Papers, LSE Archives.

Richards to Firth, 2 Jan. 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Report on Miss Edith Clarke's Survey by A I Richards, on behalf of the Supervisory Committee, LSE, 13 April 1948, enclosed in Sociological Research in the West Indies, CSSRC (48) 23, file 8/13, LSE Archives.

Comments by Vera Dantra, 23 June, 1948, file 10, Clarke Papers, LSE Archives.

Kerr, Personality and Conflict, Appendix 1, ‘Field Technique’, 210–11.

One female informant, for instance, told Obrebski that the ‘English do no good’ and should help more. Jamaicans had to ‘pay dearly’ in hospital' and the price paid for agricultural produce was so low that it was ‘[almost] not worth while to work’. See interview by Obrebski, Patenville (Warsop), Clarke Papers, file 124, LSE Archives.

A local researcher reported that sex questions asked of young men by Edith Clarke and ‘Vera’ were regarded as ‘out of order’ and private. See report by Du C. ( a local researcher), 12 Oct. 1948, Clarke Papers, file 10, LSE Archives.

Brathwaite ‘Sociology and Demographic Research’, 543, 549–50.

Clarke asserted, for instance, that in ‘Sugar Town’ sex was ‘a favourite subject of conversation’ for men and women. Men ‘enjoyed talking about their sexual prowesses', younger men were allegedly sexually initiated by older women and ‘adolescent precocity’ was regarded with ‘tolerant amusement’. Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me, 1957, 91, 169.

Kerr, Personality and Conflict, 143–44. Kerr describes these projection tests in ibid., chs 14 and 15. The Lowenfeld Mosaic Test was developed by Margaret Lowenfeld in 1929. For details, see The Lowenfeld Mosaic Test. The test depended on the subject making patterns with plastic coloured shapes on a tray fitted with white paper on which the design could be recorded. It was widely used for a variety of diagnostic purposes including the assessment of mental ability and aptitude for learning, particularly with children. The test continued to be used up to the 1960s when its use in research declined. The Rorschach projective test, named after the Swiss psychologist,Hermann Rorschach, who developed it in 1921, involves interpretation of perceptions of a series of inkblots to assess personality characteristics and emotional functioning. By the 1960s, the Rorschach was widely used but subsequently criticised on the grounds that results could not be verified and interpretations were subjective. Reber, Allen & Reber, Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, 653. Both tests are problematic in that results were very much dependent on the researcher's readings of the subject's interpretations of patterns.

Kerr, Progress Report No. 1, 29 Dec. 1947, Clarke Papers, file 77, LSE Archives.

Report on Miss Edith Clarke's Survey by A I Richards. on behalf of the Supervisory Committee, LSE, 13 April 1948, enclosed in Sociological Research in the West Indies, CSSRC (48) 23, file 8/13, LSE Archives. Detailed test results for all centres fill several bulky files in the Clarke Papers.

Richards, Report on a visit to Jamaica Aug–Sept. 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Richards to Firth n.d. (spring 1948?), FP 7/3/1. See also ibid., Clarke to Firth, 2 Jan. 1948, LSE Archives.

Richards, Report on a visit to Jamaica Aug–Sept. 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Richards to Firth n.d. (spring 1948?), FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Kerr, Progress Report No. 2, 19 April 1948, Clarke Papers, file 77, LSE Archives.

Report to LSE Colonial Studies Committee, 4 May 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Richards to Firth, 15 Aug. 1948, Richards Papers, folder 8/1/1081, file 2/2, LSE Archives.

Richards, Report on a visit to Jamaica; Richards to Firth, 1 Sept.1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives. In January 1948 Clarke had been given a ‘double strength typhoid inoculation by a drunken doctor and was unconscious for two days’ (ibid.).

Firth to Director of LSE, 7 July, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Richards, Report on a visit to Jamaica, Aug–Sept. 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Ibid.

As alleged by a male interviewee in an interview with J. O. (Obrebski), Warsop, 23 July 1947. See Clarke Papers, file 124, LSE Archives.

Firth to Richards, 12 May 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives. Tamara Obrebski had a degree in sociology and had helped her husband with research on peasants in Poland. Firth to the Director of the LSE, 22 Jan. 1947, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Firth to Professor Eveline Burns, 10 Sept. 1948; R. G. D. Allen, on behalf of the Director of the LSE, to Burns, 10 Sept 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Firth, Reference, 12 May 1948; Obrebski to Firth, Warsop, 13 Oct. 1947, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

E-mail from Lucasz Kaczmarek, 13 Aug. 2011.

Obrebski, ‘In Memory of my Father’, 324.

Obrebski to Firth, Warsop, 13 Oct. 1947, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Ciski, ‘Joseph Obrebski ’, 348.

E-mail from Lucasz Kaczmarek, 13 Aug. 2011. This reappraisal was instigated by Professor Aleksander Posern-Zeilinski, of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznan; Lucasz Kaczmarek is currently retracing Obrebski's fieldwork in Jamaica and I am indebted to him for sending on the information on Obrebski included in this article.

Obrebski gave a paper ‘Peasant Family and National Society in Jamaica’ on 28 December 1956 at the New York Meeting of the American Advancement of Science. In another unpublished paper ‘Legitimacy and Illegitimacy: A Non–Deviant Case’ (1966), Obrebski criticised the simplistic application of Malinowski's principle of legitimacy, formulated in 1930, by social researchers such as Jack Goode, Judith Blake and others (including the white researchers on WISS), which led to conclusions about the pathological, mother-headed nature of the West Indian family. Such research, argued Obrebski, disregarded the finer distinctions within Malinowski's definition whereas his own data confirmed that legal and non-legal unions were regarded as equally valid, suggesting a valid variant on the principle of legitimacy. Refuting the assumptions of weak fathering, Obrebski concluded that the role of the father remained very important (confirmed by beliefs around pregnancy and childbirth recorded by the WISS researchers) and Jamaican peasant society was, in effect, patriarchal rather than matrifocal. See Engelking and Serwański, ‘Anthropological Writings by Jozef Obrebski’, 283–304.

Glass to Firth, 16 Nov. 1949, FP 7/3/1, LSE, Archives.

Minutes of Second Meeting of A & S (Anthropology and Sociology) Committee, 25 Oct.1949, CSSRC (49), file 8/106, LSE Archives.

Clarke to Firth, 1 Jan. 1949, FP 7/3/1. According to Clarke, the disputed records comprised the 444 records and between 2000 and 3000 pages of research notes. Clarke to Kerr, 9 Jan. 1950, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Kerr to Firth, 24 Oct. 1949, FP 7/3/1. See also Richards to Firth, 8 Sept. 1949, Richards Papers, folder 8/1/1081, file 2/2. Kerr reported that Daphne Hall was also unable to get material from Clarke for her thesis. Kerr to Firth, 14 Oct. 1949, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Richards to Firth, 17 Jan.1950, FP 7/3/1; Kerr to Richards, 15 Jan. 1950, Richards Papers, file 16/11, LSE Archives.

Kerr to Firth, 31 Jan. 1950; Clarke to Firth, 2 Feb. 1950, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Kerr to Glass, 31 Oct. 1951, FP 8/1/ 5; Richards to Firth, 14 Dec. 1950, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Firth to Sally Chilver, Secretary of the CSSRC, 16 Jan. 1951, FP 7/3/1; R. G. D. Allen, for the Director of the LSE, to Professor Eveline Burns, 10 Sept. 1948, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

For a positive appraisal of Obrebski's Jamaican research data and partial analyses see Ciski, ‘Joseph Obrebski’. Obrebski (1905–67) lived and worked in the US for 20 years, at the UN and as a lecturer on sociology and anthropology at the C. W. Post College of Long Island University. After his death, on the initiative of his wife, Tamara, his 1946 Oxford lectures were published as the Changing Peasantry of Eastern Europe edited by Joel and Barbara Halpern, anthropologists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Thanks to Halpern, Obrebski's research papers, including his Jamaica archive, is in the Obrebski Collection of the Special Collections and archives at the W. E. B. Dubois library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Obrebski, ‘In Memory of my Father’.

Firth to Shapera, 15 Oct. 1951, FP 7/3/1; Glass to Firth, 16 Nov. 1951; Glass to Kerr, 6 Nov. 1951, FP 8/1/5, LSE Archives.

Shapera to Kerr, 15 Oct. 1951, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Firth to Simey, 26 Oct. 1951, copied to Chilver and Shapera, FP 8/1/5, LSE Archives.

Clarke to Firth, 12 Dec. 1950; Memo from the Colonial Office to Clarke, 3 Jan. 1951, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Draft of West Indian Social Survey Series, Vol. 1, The Family in Jamaica: An Account based on three rural communities, DB 864 14/3, enclosed in Social Survey of Jamaica. Progress Report, CSSRC (51) 36, file 8/38, LSE Archives. See also Clarke, ‘Land Tenure and the Family’.

Clarke to Shapera, 1 Oct.1951, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Firth to Clarke, 16 Dec.1955, FP 7/3/1, LSE Archives.

Minutes of 24th meeting of the A&S Committee, 29 May 1956, CSSRC (56), 8/108; Firth to Carr Saunders, 8 Dec. 1955, FP 8/1/15, LSE Archives.

Minutes of 25th meeting of the A&S Committee, 13 Dec. 1956, CSSRC (56), 8/108. Plans for a socio-economic study of Tobago to be submitted to the government of Trinidad and to be funded by the Colonial Economic Research Council were also discussed but came to nothing. Minutes of 27th meeting of the A&S Committee, Sept. 1956, CR8/108, LSE Archives.

By 1951, junior research fellows included George Cumper and Lloyd Brathwaite, a sociologist who was engaged in field work on an African-Trinidadian community. R. T. Smith was awarded a colonial studentship financed by Colonial Development and Welfare funds to study the family structure of people of African descent on coastal villages of British Guiana supervised by Meyer Fortes at Cambridge. See West Indies Institute of Social and Economic Research, Director's Report 1 April, 1951–31 March 1952, CSSRC (52) 7, file 8/44, LSE Archives. There was also continued interest in Caribbean culture from American researchers such as George Simpson, who had taught on Simey's welfare course in Jamaica.

Richards to Firth, 24 Nov. 1969, FP 8/1/108, LSE Archives.

Kerr, Personality and Conflict, 111.

Kerr, The People of Ship Street, 154, 190–91. See also hand-written notes, Comparative Study of deprivation in Jamaica and Liverpool, for a seminar given on the 24 Feb. 1953, enclosed in Clarke Papers, file 81, LSE Archives. Kerr's conclusions were endorsed by an American reviewer of Personality and Conflict who noted ‘parallel traits’ among ‘rural negroes’ in the Southern USA. See Fowler, ‘Jamaican Personality and Cultural Dynamics’, 217.

See also Proudfoot, ‘Review’, 226.

Smith, ‘Review’, 474–75.

For instance, Patterson, Dark Strangers, 300–01. See also Cross, ‘Review’, 354.

Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me, 1999, 4–5.

For instance, Barrow, Family in the Caribbean; Besson, Martha Brae's Two Histories; Chamberlain. Family Love in the Diaspora; Higman, ‘The Slave Family and Household’. For a useful review of current academic debates, see Putman, ‘Caribbean Kinship from Within and Without’.

Taylor, ‘Mothers who Father’. For a refutation of the ‘myth’ of the dominance of mother-headed families, see Chevannes, Learning to be a Man.

Thomas ‘The Violence of Diaspora’, 84.