Heritage on Commission: The Drummers and the Cruise Contract
The Carriacou Heritage Committee has been offered a three-year contract by a cruise line. For USD 180,000 a year, fourteen drummers and singers - the youngest is 58, the oldest 81 - would stage twenty-four forty-five-minute performances of a Big Drum ceremony at the cruise terminal, timed to ship arrivals. The draft contract also requires the ritual's opening flag-blessing to be cut to five minutes 'for pacing', and grants the line perpetual rights to photographs and recordings. Two of the three surviving ritual leaders say the drums 'are not a show' and refuse to take part. Village unemployment is 31 per cent, concentrated among under-25s, and the committee's dance troupe has nowhere to practise. A rival proposal would put the fee towards a community cultural centre with a paid apprenticeship for twelve young people, but the remaining funds would take two years to raise. The committee votes in three weeks.
1. Explain the main cultural risk in the cruise contract, and distinguish between cultural preservation and cultural commodification in this case.
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The risk is not payment. Paid performance has a long history in the Caribbean; a fee alone does not corrupt a practice. The risk lies in the three clauses that move decision rights from the ritual leaders to the purchaser: fixed duration, editing of the flag-blessing, and perpetual image rights.
The distinction to draw:
- Preservation means maintaining the conditions under which a practice is transmitted - people able to drum, occasions on which it is performed, the authority of elders to decide what may change, and young people learning. The age profile here (58 to 81, three ritual leaders of whom two refuse) is the real preservation emergency.
- Commodification means the practice comes to be valued mainly as a saleable experience, so its internal criteria - whether an occasion is appropriate, who may perform, how long it lasts - are subordinated to market criteria: pacing, repeatability, photographability.
Why the two are not opposites. A fee can fund transmission. The test is who holds decision rights afterwards and whether the practice continues outside the paid setting. Here the contract grants editing rights and perpetual imagery to the buyer, so the practice is being re-specified by the customer.
The specific danger is folklorisation: the 45-minute version, repeated twenty-four times a year, becomes what audiences and eventually young villagers take the ceremony to be, while the unfilmed, unedited version loses its audience.
2. Recommend how the committee should vote. State the criteria you are using and at least two conditions that would change your recommendation.
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Criteria, in order: (1) transmission to people under 25; (2) decision rights retained by ritual leaders; (3) income that is stable and dignified; (4) reversibility if it goes wrong.
Recommendation: neither instant yes nor refusal - a counter-offer with a negotiating mandate. The reason is that the binary vote is false. The fee (USD 180,000 a year, USD 540,000 over three years) divided among fourteen performers is about USD 12,850 each before costs - real money in a village at 31 per cent unemployment, but not enough to justify surrendering the ritual. The community-centre option has better transmission logic (twelve apprentices annually) but is two years from being funded, and its matching funds may never arrive.
Counter-offer terms: twelve performances a year, not twenty-four; the full ceremony, unedited, with a short explanatory introduction instead of a cut flag-blessing; image rights retained by the committee with a limited three-year licence; a written apprenticeship clause funded from the fee; an elders' council with a veto over staging.
What would change the recommendation:
- If the line refuses the veto and the image-rights change, decline - control, not cash, is the issue.
- If the two dissenting ritual leaders maintain their refusal, do not stage a substitute 'ceremony' without them; that version is not the thing being sold.
- If the centre's matching funds were secured within the three weeks, the calculation shifts decisively towards the centre.
3. One committee member argues that because the ritual is 'living culture' it must change anyway, so the contract is harmless. Evaluate this reasoning.
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The premise is sound; the inference is not.
Sound: there is no frozen original to protect. Big Drum has changed before - new songs, different occasions, changes forced by migration and by the death of practitioners. A preservation argument that treats any change as loss is empirically and historically wrong, and it can be used to freeze a practice in a museum version that nobody under 40 wants to perform. Commodification has also funded transmission repeatedly in the region (calypso, steelband, reggae).
Unsound: the argument treats all change as equivalent, which it is not. The relevant difference is authorship and direction. Change generated by practitioners answering their own needs - shortening a night's performance because the drummers are elderly, adding a new song - is adaptation. Change dictated by a buyer's timetable, written into a contract with penalties, and accompanied by a perpetual transfer of image rights is something else: the community loses the ability to decide next time.
A second flaw: the argument defeats an objection nobody made. No one proposed fixing the ritual forever; the objection concerns three specific clauses. Even a member who accepts that culture changes must still ask who gets to change it and who profits.
Judgement: the reasoning is a useful corrective to romanticism but it is not decisive. It removes one bad argument against the contract and answers none of the terms actually on the table.