(C-U)

The following is the edited text of Dr. Richard Kurin's keynote address to participants in the Summer Institute of Virgin Islands Culture. We sought Dr. Kurin's participation as a presenter for many reasons.

First, as Director of the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife Programs & Cultural Studies he played a key role in bringing presentations of Virgin Islands' and Senegalese culture to the National Mall of the United States in the Summer of 1990 as part of the annual Festival of American Folklife. This was a particularly trying period for Virgin Islanders, given the devastation of the islands only nine months earlier by Hurricane Hugo. Dr. Kurin's cultural, diplomatic, and organizational skills were severely tested in mobilizing teams of cultural scholars and researchers in the islands, on the African continent and in the United States. He succeeded in cultivating and inculcating goodwill, comporting himself with the appropriate sensitivity and the necessary optimism, so that the best of the folklife and culture of our people could be showcased, simultaneously with that of Senegal.

Two years later, the following year, we brought the Festival program back home and a new edition was produced at Estate Lower Love on St. Croix. High on the list of local consultants and coordinators that Kurin and his team recruited for the Festival on the Mall and that they endorsed for the one on St. Croix were the editor of the current document and chief co-editor, Professors Gilbert A. Sprauve and Gene Emmanuel, respectively. Moral support and technical assistance from the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife Programs & Cultural Studies has been continuous and enthusiastic.

Specifically, with respect to the content of Dr. Kurin's address, it should be noted that in the first of our two pre-institute workshops the director felt that participants (all Virgin Islands educators and cultural specialists) should prime up for the day's roundtable workshop by reading a particular publication on culture and sharing reactions with the group. The document assigned by the director was a very recent article appearing in the Journal of the American Folklore written by Roger Abrams and dealing with what he called "romantic nationalism." While the article could not be said to be in any way focused on any aspect of the Virgin Islands or Caribbean culture generally, we viewed its treatment of the modern history of national folk culture as potentially provocative for our group and also as the type of reading that would help foster the mood of objectivity needed to generate a reasonably theoretical discussion of Virgin Islands' culture. Dr. Kurin is eminently familiar with Abrams' work, and we felt that as we wound down the Institute it might be useful to have him guide us on a re-visit to the publication and to see in specific ways how it might relate to the Institute's purview and scope.

It is a pleasure for me, both personally and professionally, to continue the cultural dialog with scholars, educators, officials, and culture bearers in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It is through a healthy exchange of ideas between committed people of goodwill at local, territorial, regional, national and international levels that challenging cultural issues can be encountered and clarified, and strategies, approaches and solutions assessed and formulated. I am deeply grateful to Virgin Islanders for inspiring, challenging, and contributing to my work and that of the Smithsonian Institution over the past few years.

Working at the Smithsonian Institution, I've had to think more and more about the characteristics of cultural representation. This was particularly so when the so-called "culture wars" became a national issue in the 1992 U.S. presidential elections and where, for the inauguration, I was asked to help develop the plans for celebrating American culture in an inaugural festival termed an American Reunion on the Mall. The issues of what is American culture, and whose culture is it? come to the fore. It is not that the general principles behind these issues are particularly American. I think Jamaicans are asking some of the same questions. And so too are the Soviets who it seems had a national culture in December, 1993 and then did not the next month with the dissolution of the larger state.

My thinking on the status of national culture is truly a work in progress. I am trying to come to terms with a variety of ideas that carry through in my work at the Smithsonian and involve interaction and engagement with some of the people in this room through such intense, high visibility projects as the Virgin Islands festival programs.

I am one of the people in the U.S. government's national institutional apparatus who has to define what "folklore," "folk culture," or a "people's cultural heritage" is. When the Smithsonian took on the role of developing the Virgin Islands program at the Folklife Festival we had to define, at least operationally the question of what is folklore? What is it not? What counts? What doesn't? Traditional Anansi stories and familiar Virgin Islands foods seem to be accepted elements of Virgin Islands folklore. But do the paintings in the Art Museum in St. Thomas count as part of people's folk culture? What about quadrille? How polished and choreographed does it have to be before it's not folklore? I don't know, exactly! But when we talk about expressive forms of culture, whether they be oral, visual, or manual, the genuine folk forms refer to those arising from interactions of people in groups, generally passed down informally across generations. And such forms of expression are the property of those people, under their control and authority exercised informally.

Politics and Economics of Culture

When we talk about cultural nationalism, we introduce the role of the state. The state exerts influence, formally and informally over the cultural practice of the people. The state can promote or discourage folk culture as a whole in or its different parts. States can encourage folklore to be written down or otherwise formalized. It can try to wipe out practices it regards as primitive and vulgar. It can rearrange and choreograph folk culture. It can set up arts and culture agencies to institutionalize it. It could promote majority culture, or promote tourism art. It could promote natives coming out with smiling faces and wearing pretty costumes. The state can oppress forms of the culture of the people. State authorities could say, "Hey, I don't like those people down at the marketplace singing those calypso verses about me! It incites other people," and forbid the practice. State policy toward culture may be officially neutral, but that is exceedingly difficult to effect in actuality. Use of official language, forms of adornment, the curricula taught in the schools, even forms of entertainment offered at state functions encourage certain forms of cultural expression and discourage others.

Not only is culture becoming the number one political issue, but it's also becoming the number one economic issue. Though it may already be so, culture is becoming the world's largest industry. There is a huge amount of money spent these days aimed at producing and controlling the symbols, images, values, ideas, and beliefs of the world's people. Think of all types of cultural production as an industry--from advertising about what you should eat and wear, to tourism, entertainment, education, and the movement of information in books, over radio, television, computer networks and the like. Now who are the producers and sellers of that culture? To and for whom are they selling?

There is a tremendous amount of resources involved in the economics of cultural production. That's why I think it's important to look at state policies. State cultural policies can determine what languages may be spoken, and where. They determine what is taught in the schools, who and what is to be respected. They often determine who is eligible to be taught whose history. And state policies can include and exclude people from that history, defining some people as culture heroes, consigning others to oblivion. State policy may even decide what is defined as knowledge and what isn't. State policy can also determine who has rights and privileges, based on your culture and the interest of the state, as for example when a recent Supreme Court decision had to consider whether the religious duty of some citizens to sacrifice animals would override the interest of the state to reduce cruelty to animals. The state can encourage certain occupations with cultural roots and discourage others.

Should the state promote high culture, popular culture, commercial culture, or folk culture? Should it abstain from using culture as a tool for either national unity or the expression of personal freedom? Should the state foster a singular cultural identity among its populace, or a diverse nation? Should the state invest its own resources in culture, and to what end?

Folklore and Nationalism

I'd like to discuss the way folklore is differentially construed in relation to the state, a subject under consideration by the seminar and treated in Roger Abrams' article recently published in the Journal of American Folklore. Abrams is a distinguished professor of folklife and folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, a leader in the field and one of our closest advisors for the Smithsonian. Abrams is a close and respected friend of mine, and has also done a lot of research in the Caribbean.

In this article, Abram notes that folklore is defined in different ways by different sets of people who have an interest in doing so. While we all might go from now until doomsday trying to find the definitive statement of what we mean by folklore, we are not likely to find it. Rather, says Abrams, forget about looking for a particular definition. Concentrate instead on who is doing the defining. That will help us focus on what is being defined, for what purpose, and with what consequences.

Abrams poses two categories of definers and definitions. One, he finds in pre-modern Europe. He asserts that the earliest definitions of popular antiquity and folklore came from the aristocracy and represented an effort to find in myths, legends, epics, and tales the charter for aristocratic rule. These stories of ancient kings and their lands and kingdoms helped a contemporary aristocracy legitimate their domain, sovereignty, and position. Folklore helped kings claim land as theirs, justified by divine right, and the weight of history.

Abrams' second group of definers are bourgeois nationalists of the 18th and 19th centuries--the urbane people driving the Industrial Revolution. Abrams argues that these people in France, Britain, and Germany were trying to construe the state in new terms--not in those of aristocracies, but in terms of unities of peoples, languages, and races. The basis of the state for them is something called the nation, which is thought to be a people who are physically unique, and different from others by their very nature. The people are intimately associated with a land, a particular land that gives them sustenance. And the people have a language which determines their culture. But language and culture are not just arbitrary. There is little emphasis on the fact that they are learned. Instead, language also is thought to have a basis in the nature of the people and the nature of the land. It is given. And it is tied to brain size and other physical characteristics. Indeed, the notion of nationhood is defined as a complex of a physically distinct race of people, natively born of a particular land, and speaking a language suited to them. By the mid-19th century, Europe is awash in romantic nationalism, with scholars and scientists examining how skull shapes and bumps on the head reveal national character (and pathologies), how language and nationhood developed (through the study of myth and folklore), and what the ideal type of German, Frenchman, or Englishmen should look like. With the desire to establish a state based upon nationality, a people start inventing its various characteristics and elaborations. Traditions of peoplehood--of the folk--are in many cases invented, as with national costumes, for example. Songs, ballads and folk tales are invested with stronger, nationalistic meaning as they come to stand both metaphorically and metanymically for the nation of the whole. And national destinies--generally the formation or expansion of the national state--are sensed and articulated. Hence the German philosophers find a geist, or spirit, guiding the destiny of their people. In the U.S., this emerges by century's end in the form of "manifest destiny."

This nationalism is a remedial nationalism, a reaction to modernism, in which people who are involved in the Industrial Revolution have to confront its consequences. Rapid urbanization made for harsh city life; migration de-stabilized familial and conventional security; new jobs were performed under extremely bad working conditions. A lot of people welcomed nostalgic feelings for perceived bygone days. From the point of view of someone living in urban squalor with no facilities, a lousy job, disrupted family, and a lot of uncertainty --the quaint days of village life, as a symbol of the natural and the traditional--one probably looked pretty good. This widespread feeling feeds the notion of folklore in the 19th century.

While I agree with Abrams' analysis and astute treatment of European folklorization, I think it is limited. Perhaps it is a way of tracing how folklore develops as an academic discipline or field in 19th century Europe. But it doesn't deal with the full relationship between folk culture, nationality and state formation in much of the rest of the world, or in settings where it did not result in the academization of folklore. In this article Abrams is curiously silent about the development of folklore and the state in the United States, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and even the Soviet bloc. There is no treatment of how folklore was used to articulate an idea of self-identity against the state, as in opposition to colonial powers. In Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico and many places, folklore is used by nationalists as a way of fighting against entrenched colonial powers. In South Africa traditional songs have been widely used to summon up local communities to fight against the Afrikaaner state. This is found even in the United States. If you look at the folklore movement in the 20th century, you find various leftists, union organizers, and civil rights activists using folklore to assert the rights of lower classes, minorities and others in their opposition to the state. Many others use folklore as a form of resistance against the state.

If you look at the Soviet Union and other places in Eastern Europe, you see something else entirely. There, folklore has been so thoroughly reinvented by the state that people nowadays rebel against it--seeing in it the symbolic projection of state control over culture and the expressive life of its people. In the Soviet Union and its successor states, folklore takes on the appearance of a theatrically, choreographed, costumed spectacle which people have to learn from state sanctioned organizations. Folklore becomes in a way the "official culture" of the people, and has almost totally replaced every form of expression actually created by people at the community level. Indeed, as the community has been replaced by the state, so too has its forms of expression. Soviet folklore was used to show that the state had overcome the feudal order upon which serfdom was based. Soviet folklore indeed said peasant culture was good and strong, and that regional culture was part of people's legitimate heritage. It also disconnected royal and courtly culture from peasant folklore, ignoring it, and saying in effect that the aristocratic culture of the czars was not the legitimate culture of the nation. The Soviets didn't want to go back to 19th century peasant life, when most of the common people were serfs. Instead, the Soviets recognized peasant customs, folklore, forms of dress, song and so on, but strategically included or encompassed them in a larger idea. And indeed when the state held folklore festivals you'd see the marvelous display of troupes of people from the different Soviet states, dressed up in their native costumes, all arrayed in long lines and columns, neatly different, yet supremely choreographed. They reminded me of Olympics opening ceremonies--staged spectacles of international brotherhood, unity, or other idealistic goal. They also reminded me of Nazi Germany. The people, neatly arrayed, the various regional, ethnic and local cultures of the Soviet Union under the willing domination and control of the state.

Folklore, as the culture of the people, is much more messy and organic. By definition it is decentralized, widely shared--not owned, and generally unorganized. Populist, if not democratic, folklore generally operates under the sight of the state, often frustratingly unaffected by state authority or decree. Hence it takes on the connotation of rumor, wrongful knowledge, even public ignorance to the rationality of the powerful. By concentrating on the development of folklore as an academic discipline--as the study of folklore in Europe--instead of its subject matter--people's culture the world over, Abrams passes over much of current significance. Indeed, he implies that folklore is really a matter of particular historical occurrence, located in a European national past, rather than something that drives events today.

Currently, we see the workings of folk beliefs and folk religion in revivalistic movements. Hindu fundamentalists in India, Muslim fundamentalists from north Africa across southern Asia, Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, and Christian fundamentalists in the United States are all pursuing new forms of statehood, realignments of traditional, popular and elite culture and values. These are not people, energies or events of the past. They are thoroughly contemporary, non-state movements of people trying to grapple with their lives. In many cases, these movements threaten to overwhelm or undercut the authority of the state, and are perceived by the state as somewhat dangerous and uncontrollable.

Another important item that Abrams seems to miss in his analysis of the construction of folklore is consideration of intermediate forms of social organization between the state and the people. Intermediate structures or institutions such as churches, neighborhood organizations, marketplaces, workplaces, clubs, carnival crews, self-help societies, professional associations, unions and others exist as intermediary social formations between the individual and the state. They play an important role in terms of defining and expressing the culture of the people. Somehow, this is absent in Abrams' analysis, and for me, that is where much of folklore is to be found.

A final absence in Abrams' article should be noted. An important group defining folklore is not dealt with at any length. Abrams never identifies scholars as having a stake in how folklore is defined and for what purpose. My sense is that the folk are going to outlast the folklorists, that culture will outlast the cultural anthropologist, and that history will be here long after the historians. Scholars, I included, make a living studying, writing about, and talking about what others believe and do. Currently, scholars in these areas are mainly in retreat, generating a lot of self-referential, self-reflective literature that goes without any action or responsibility.

Abrams' article does leave us with a challenge, a challenge that should be particularly felt in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He takes to task the way in which most people view folk communities. The dominant model of folk communities today is that the true folks are generally rural people--as in St. Croix or St. John, or those living in relatively isolated, concentrated urban pockets, like in Savanne or Frenchtown on St. Thomas, for example. Or they may be an occupational group practicing a pre-modern form of work--fishermen, for example. Again, the dominant idea about these people is that they are unicultural. Their culture is taken to be more traditional than that of others. It's orally transmitted and not thought about much--it is taken for granted. In this paradigm, these folks become less folk when they become urbanized and more educated. They are assimilated, lose their folksiness and become less marginal

and more modern.

With this is a loss of a sense of community. In this model, the folk community is taken to result from face to face interactions, people enjoying ongoing ties and relationships with people they know for generations. The modern community if it exists is truncated and severely limited. More often, the modern community is only legalistically or formally constituted, is short-lasting, dissipated, more anonymous, and less involved in day to day life.

In this view of the folk and the community, folklore, or people's culture, is constituted by the natural expressions of that community of folk. We don't have to do anything intrusive to make it come out. We don't want to choreograph it. We don't want to touch it. We don't want to change a word. It's there, it's pure, it's somehow natural--like the rain forests. And folk documents are constituted by speech, unschooled craft, daily social occasions and celebrations. The dangers and threats to folklore are fairly self evident--formalization, elaboration from without, new inspirations and sources of creativity that challenge the traditional way. Hence for example, a folklorist fieldworker comes into the community, says: "Well, tell me that Anansi story again!" The person tells the story again. The folklorist writes it down. Now, the person who used to tell the story wants to see the written form. After a while, the written form becomes crystallized as the real or authentic version. It is published outside the community, and comes to stand for the culture in the wider world. A book makes its way back to the community, or is brought by a fieldworker of the next generation who finds that the story has changed, and that the people now do not properly know their own culture. The state is then assumed to have the responsibility to help the community preserve, or even relearn its own culture, and so it establishes programs in the schools, research, public programs and the like.

This dominant model has a lot that makes sense, and it does resonate with much that we see. But it is also much too simple to apply to the processes of culture in the complicated real world. How we apply such concepts as culture, folk, community and even nationality are not self-evident or simple tasks.

Consider the question discussed earlier in the seminar--"What's included in Virgin Islands culture?"--and you can see very clearly the problems with the dominant paradigm. First, just who is in the community? Are immigrants from down islands who live in Savanne part of the community? How about those who work in the hotels and restaurants, are they included? What about the Puerto Ricans in St. Croix, or the mainlanders who own condominiums here and are part-time residents? How can we talk about the "naturalness" of culture when so many Virgin Islanders adopt forms of pan- Caribbean music and art and take them as their own? And what do we do about Virgin Islanders in New York? Presumably they're carrying Virgin Islands culture by cooking pates and johnny cakes and kallalou in their Brooklyn kitchens. Where is the community? People speak over the phone, or people write letters back and forth, or people even have fax-to-fax instead of face-to-face communication. Does this count? Is it a modern form of traditional community life, or its destroyer?

Contemporary Folklife in a Complex World

There is a growing notion in the world that there are human cultural rights. The specifics of what those rights are, who has them, and what is of common value to humanity is still debated. Yet it would seem that any formulation of cultural rights would have to identify the ongoing creation and manipulation of culture. Rights mean the ability of people to create, expand debate and manipulate their culture. That's how culture is made. Culture is made in a sublimely local way. It is made by the people. It is made every time a Virgin Islander in Savanne cooks a meal or somebody celebrates a birthday, or somebody speaks, or talks, or sings, or dresses up, or attends a wake, or goes to work.

Culture, being creative and adaptive, fosters diversity. Whether that is a problem or a resource depends on who's talking. Is cultural diversity good or bad for a nation? Some would argue that cultural diversity is a problem, taking away from the center, from the kind of social consensus of the nation. Such a view assumes that the prevailing culture is complete, whole, and unchanging. Thus, diversity could be seen as preventing assimilation to a homogeneous way of life. But what is the homogeneous way of life that cultural diversity threatens? Americans, for example, might legitimately ask whether it is American pop culture? Biblical culture? Greco-Roman culture? Anglo culture?

More convincing is to view culture in dynamic terms. Immigrants and the young might bring new ideas and things into creation. But so too do cultural exemplars and older people who have the security to experiment. Cultural creativity will be found at local, national and global levels. It will be found in high literature and with songs of the streets. It will be found in so-called centers--in New York, Paris, Washington, and Hollywood, but also on the so-called periphery in San Juan, in Watts, in Bangor, and Mexico City. Indeed, the very idea of what is central and peripheral is likely to become increasingly meaningless.

There is a great democratization of culture taking place. Technology is a major factor in this--for it is much harder for any one to control it. Nowadays, you don't have to be rich to control or use contemporary technology. For mere dollars, students in China communicated about the Tieneman Square protests to the world. For $69.95 one can buy a dual cassette recorder and establish a virtual recording company. For $1,200 a person or group can become their own movie company. Technology has allowed for an amazing degree of decentralization in terms of the documentation, creation and control of cultural produce--as amply demonstrated by the growth and character of the Internet. But the use and worth of this technology is predicated upon dialogue--people communicating with each other, across institutions, interest groups, distances, nations, and languages.

Besides encouraging the use of technology to enhance cultural dialog, training has to occur to produce morally committed, economically street-smart, politically savvy, intellectually adept people to navigate contemporary cultural waters. We all need good cultural workers who can connect with the culture of the people, document, understand, analyze, and interpret what is happening. We need competent people to work on the economic viability of local culture and how things indeed can survive. We need cultural brokers and liaisons who can help people culturally represent themselves before those people are shut out of having their voice heard. We also need workers who protect the rights of people, communities and groups in their cultural property. Increasingly, companies and popular artists are exploring the cultural property of others in order to exploit it and appropriate it for their own use without properly compensating those who produced it. Pharmaceutical companies for example are trying to find cures for cancer and AIDS and other afflictions. They're sending scientists to the rain forests to visit with the shamans, the bush healers and other people who know about herbs and other things growing there. They pay local knowledge bearers a hundred dollars or so and then take a potential cure or other useful medicine back to their laboratories where they might develop products worth millions. This has also happened musically as pop singers bring back rhythms, lyrics and styles from South Africa or Cajun country, copyright music that is not theirs, and yet make millions from it--offering back little in return to the people and communities who developed and nurtured the music. Obversely, we are seeing large corporations marketing products that appropriate local culture back to those people. Heinz ketchup is marketing salsa back to Mexican Americans. Coca Cola came out with Gombay punch in the Bahamas. To compete, Pepsi is now marketing Junkanoo Punch. Can the day of Egg McFoo Yung, Pizza Hut Pates, and Dunkin' Johnny Cake Donuts be far behind? There are vast locally based, community centered cultural resources that can be used to generate income, economic development, and concrete benefits to common people. But workers are needed to figure out how.

Finally, doctors, lawyers, political leaders, teachers, and numerous others have to be made more aware and become more sophisticated about cultural issues. People have to be trained in cultural studies and practice. Some people did take such training. In the last generation, Jomo Kenyatta, for example, studied anthropology at the London School of Economics, did a study of Kenya, wrote a book, Facing Mount Kenya, led an independence movement and became Kenya's first president. But by and large politicians and bankers, corporate heads and public servants, nurses and teachers are not well versed in cultural issues or any in-depth understanding of cultural resources and processes--even in their own community. We need people, and need them now, if we are to catch up with the complex cultural world in which we live and will increasingly have to understand.

QUESTIONS:

1. In a brief paragraph, explain Dr. Kurin's involvement in Virgin Islands folk culture.

2. Tell how the Office of Folklife Programs of the Smithsonian became involved in the Clinton-Gore inaugural. Is this a question of a healthy or unhealthy alliance between culture and politics in your opinion? Explain your answer!

3. When Kurin discusses Politics and the Economics of Culture he speaks of the State's involvement. What does "state" mean in this context?

4. According to Kurin, where does culture fit into the scheme of politics today?

5. The author seems to suggest something insidious in the relationship between the imagery of advertising and culture. What is the underlying message here?

6. Dr. Kurin suggests a continuum of cultural information and knowledge between Disneyland type attractions and scholarly sources. Where on such a continuum would you place folklife festivals, based on what you know of them from this article and from real life experiences?

7. Is there any particular reason why fishing rights in the Virgin Islands may or may not be decided based on precedence in the Great Lakes involving American Indians?

8. Give one good reason why the Roger Abrams article under discussion here might apply to issues of culture in our region?

9. According to Kurin, Abrams' concept of the definition of culture has to do primarily with contexts, environments or even individuals. Explain this process>

10. According to 19th century bourgeois nationalists what are the basic ingredients of nationhood or nationality?

11. Are you able to establish a systematic connection between a concept of culture and "manifest destiny?"

12. 19th century bourgeois nationalism is seen here as a reaction to modernism and thus remedial. What is the situation it attempts to remedy or exploit?

13. Is it accurate to say that Kurin's major bone of contention with Abrams is the latter's failure to recognize cultural authority stemming from the colonized or the formerly colonized as an underclass? Explain your answer.

14. The modernization process sometimes mindlessly plows culture underfoot. In the Soviet Union, however, according to this article, the process is programmed. Explain how and cite one of its consequences.

15. Kurin implies that populist folklore can be a tool of resistance. Can you identify the words by which this suggestion is made?

16. Kurin discusses fundamentalist cultures in India, North Africa, Israel and Southern Asia and mentions perceived threats to the authority of the State. Can you cite a recent event that would appear to bear witness to the concerns mentioned here?

17. In what category would Kurin place self-help organizations among Abrams overlooked agencies?

18. One particular trend in cultural research in recent years is seen here as eventually turning from source of useful perspective to unhealthy preoccupation. Can you state what is and trace its emergence?

19. Formalization and elaboration are seen as the main dangers to folk culture in its own element. Can cultural documentation be conducted ethically without creating a situation of overexposure to these dangers? How?

20. Kurin notes several latent or potential cultural sub-groupings presently operating in the Virgin Islands. Can you identify two of them and cite for each one the cultural activity around which it appears to organize itself?

21. According to Kurin some observers see the advocacy of cultural diversity as potentially dangerous for national unity in the U.S. Can you explain why? Are similar concerns evident in the U.S. Virgin Islands currently?

22. How does Kurin characterize the most important manifestation of culture today in the here and now?

23. What is the author's main prescription for state cultural policies, given the current flourishing of multivocal culture.

24. In the decision-making concerning cultural diversity versus cultural unity, how is the age factor viewed by the author?

25. In your opinion, which of these cultures Americans are likely to be most zealous about protecting: pop, Biblical, Greco-Roman or Anglo? Which culture are we as Virgin Islands most likely to defend? Which one, as West Indians?