“Il faut travailler ton Francais”, I recall my mum saying. “You need to work on your French.” It was a regular summer afternoon, and as regular summer afternoons went, I was working on exercises from the next year’s curriculum under my mum’s supervision. This was when I was still in primary school, say grade 3 or 4. The subject I …
Carnival culture or commodity:
Dr Hillary Brown of the CARICOM secretariat on the evolutions of carnival.
This is the crux of many a discussion on culture and carnival. There is the view of the cultural purists who want to see the tradition stay the same, where the meaning and connection to the origin are preserved. Then there are the entrepreneurs who say ‘yes, but it’s also business’. There is always this tension between the instrumental value and economic value of culture and the arts.
