INTRODUCTION OF KREOL

The concept of cultural creolisation, introduced in anthropology by Ulf Hannerz (see Hannerz 1992), refers to the intermingling and mixing of two or several formerly discrete traditions or cultures. In an era of global mass communication and capitalism, creolisation can be identified nearly everywhere in the world, but there are important differences as to the degree of mixing. The concept has been criticized for essentialising
cultures (as if the merging traditions were “pure” at the outset, cf. Friedman 1994). Although this critique may sometimes be relevant, the concept nevertheless helps to
make sense of a great number of contemporary cultural processes, characterised by movement, change and fuzzy boundaries.

Creolisation, as it is used by some anthropologists, is an analogy taken from linguistics. This discipline in turn took the term from a particular aspect of colonialism, namely the uprooting and displacement of large numbers of people to the plantation economies of certain colonies, such as Louisiana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Réunion and
Mauritius. Both in the Caribbean basin and in the Indian Ocean, certain (or all) groups who contributed to this economy during slavery were described as creoles. Originally, a criollo meant a European (normally a Spaniard) born in the New World (as opposed to
peninsulares); today, a similar usage is current in La Réunion, where everybody born in the island, regardless of skin colour, is seen as créole, as opposed to the zoreils who were born in metropolitan France. In Trinidad, the term creole is sometimes used to
designate all Trinidadians except those of Asian origin. In Suriname, a creole is a person of African origin, while in neighbouring French Guyana a creole is a person who has adopted a European way of life. In spite of the differences, there are some important resemblances between the various conceptualisations of “the creole”, which resonate with the theoretical concept of creolisation: Creoles are uprooted, they belong to the
New World, are the products of some form of mixing, and are contrasted with that which is old, deep and rooted. This paper sets out to discuss the concept of the creole —
related both to language and to people — as it is used in Mauritius, and then relate the Mauritian situation to the general use of the concept of creolisation.