Contemporary Creoleness; or, The World in Pidginization?

“Creolization” has often been terminologically equated with “hybridization,” “syncretization,” and other terms referring to processes of mixture. Normative assumptions concerning categories of race, origin, and culture as well as emic labeling have had a strong impact on who and what was labeled as creole. I argue for a more concise and contextualized understanding of the term “creole” to warrant its usefulness for comparative cultural analysis. Examining the social and historical context of creolization and tracing the etymology of “creole” and its meanings over time show that creolization has been distinct in involving indigenization and—to varying degrees—ethnicization of diverse and in large part foreign populations. Taking into account creolization's—and creole terminology's—historical semantics helps unfold the latter's heuristic potentials for a more systematic and comparative analysis, conceptualization, and differentiation of contemporary processes of interaction and mixture. By connecting the historical semantics of creolization and creoleness with specific sociolinguistic approaches to distinguish between creole and pidgin variants of language, historical creolization's major contemporary “outcome”—pidginization of culture and identity—comes to light, a process prevalent particularly in postcolonial societies. Theoretical assumptions will be substantiated by empirical examples from Indonesia and Sierra Leone.