Saturday, August 09, 2008

The Naming of Names

Recently an American researcher traveled to Barbados and on finding that the world's smallest snake lived there, cataloged it and named it after his wife, with the binomial Leptotyphlops carlae.

Just one problem -- astonishingly, Bajans already knew all about the thread snake, their name for the tiny ophidian living in their midst. And some of them aren't very impressed that a foreigner has dropped by to rename their fauna as though they were somehow unaware of it.

I'm with the Bajans on this one. All too often academics from the developed world get credit for "discoveries" that give no credit to indigenous peoples who knew about them long before. I'm reminded of how old people in Dominica knew to eat old bread when they were ill long before Alexander Fleming isolated penicillin from bread mold.

I also thought it was interesting that all the images I've seen that show how small the thread snake is use a U.S. quarter as a comparison object rather than a Bajan one, especially since they're the same size. I suppose I understand the point of using an object the size of which is widely recognizable but why not use a culturally neutral one, like a pencil -- or a ruler, for that matter?

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by Steve Foerster at 12:00 PM | 0 comments (create) - (View)

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Dominica: Where the Freedom Is

Note: Recently I was offered a preliminary look at a new index of which countries are the most free, both in terms of civil liberties and in terms of free markets. Here was my response.

I thought your index was interesting, but it had the same problem as all of the indices from which you draw information -- small island states are not listed.

For several years I lived in Dominica, the small English-speaking island in the Eastern Caribbean, not the larger Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic on the Northern Caribbean island of Hispaniola. It is on par with anywhere in the world when it comes to liberty.

There is simply no meaningful restriction on civil liberties there. People say what they want, when they want. There's a guy who literally drives around in a car with megaphones on the roof declaring his opinions on every subject. News media are critical of the government almost to excess, and freedom of religion is respected as well. There are laws against drug use, but few seem to care about them and there are people who smoke marijuana openly. I found more people cared more about the public health effects of drug use than in the use itself.

There is no military, and those in the police service are part of the communities in which they live and work, rather than being militarized and separate as here in the U.S. I found they mostly served to settle individual disputes rather than harass people. (I've heard this wasn't always the case back in the day, especially against Rastafarians, but that things have changed and that the bad apples were dismissed.)

There are controls on immigration, but they are not strictly enforced. Even so, it's not difficult for foreigners to get a work permit. Their biggest problem with illegal immigration are "Spanish girls" (i.e., prostitutes from Santo Domingo). There are Haitians working there illegally, mostly in agriculture, the island's dominant industry, but they're appreciated for working hard, and no one seems to bother them otherwise.

Economics are not quite as good, but still excellent. Taxation is not excessive, and a foreigner coming in to start an international business easily can have a work permit and a ten year tax holiday. There are competitive telecommunications for phone service and broadband Internet, although rates for international phone calls are very high, and it's well worth using VoIP. There are monopolies for power and water, but thanks to the rainy climate the latter is easily evaded through use of cisterns, and the former is annoying, but nowhere near as bad as in many other developing countries.

So if it's so great, why doesn't it show prominently on the indices of free countries? It's not the only missing entry, as many other Caribbean small islands states are missing as well. I think it's because their populations are too small. At 70,000 people, Dominica is just 1/3 of 1% the size of the U.S., and some islands are even smaller than that. While that's bad for the accuracy of freedom indices, I have to admit it's probably a good thing for those of us who know where the freedom is.

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by Steve Foerster at 11:10 AM | 0 comments (create) - (View)