ABSTRACT
In 1498 Columbus, coming upon this island about the size of the US state of Delaware, observed what to him and a long series of reporters after him seemed to be "wildmen," naked beings living in the "wilderness" with no fixed abode. Such beings had been emblematized in European festive performances for several centuries prior to their discovery in the West Indies. They had existed in Greco-Roman and Christian imaginations for a much longer period – consider the Scythians or hairy, disheveled John the Baptist. Since the voyages of Columbus, most Europeans and Euro-Americans have reduced Amerindians to their pre-conceptions of wild people and wilderness, finding in the stereotype a convenient cipher for one of those dualisms which seem almost intrinsic to human reasoning: us and the others; we who are civilized and you who are not. Since carnival is, among other things, a festival of inversion, we who are civilized can play at being you who are not. But what if the "we" in question is also not considered civilized by the dominant culture into which "we" are born? Then "we" may play back and forth, ambivalently, across this line of division, momentarily placed in question. How this option has been drawn upon in Trinidad, how the tradition of Amerindian masking is today pursued by a small neighborhood band in San Fernando, is our subject here.
