Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an

In every­day con­ver­sa­tions, pop­u­lar cul­ture, and Face­book be­hav­iour, promis­cu­ity in T&T is a fa­mil­iar top­ic. In cer­tain con­texts, like Car­ni­val con­certs and fetes like Un­faith­ful–where pa­trons get bands for "mar­ried," "horn­ing" and "sin­gle," it is cel­e­brat­ed.An an­thro­pol­o­gist lis­ten­ing to such talk might sug­gest that in Trin­bag­on­ian so­ci­ety a horn is a cul­tur­al vari­a­tion on the tra­di­tion­al monog­a­mous cou­ple most fa­mil­iar to West­ern so­ci­ety.

His­tor­i­cal­ly such promis­cu­ity was thought to be a male phe­nom­e­non. So­cial sci­en­tists study­ing T&T in the 60s and 70s wrote books de­scrib­ing men as hav­ing "deputies" and out­side women. And that Caribbean so­ci­eties were struc­tured by the con­cept of "rep­u­ta­tion and re­spectabil­i­ty." This bi­na­ry re­in­forced the lop­sided view that women are the ones with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to be monog­a­mous. Men, of course, must have deputies to en­hance their rep­u­ta­tion.

Such rep­re­sen­ta­tions have been shown to be false. Trin­bag­on­ian women ex­er­cise au­ton­o­my and con­trol their sex­u­al­i­ty too. Mem­bers of both gen­ders horn their part­ners. And de­spite a gen­er­al so­ci­etal em­pha­sis on what Pe­ter Wil­son called "re­spectabil­i­ty," women's sex­u­al­i­ty is nei­ther pas­sive nor lim­it­ed to monogamy.

With this his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al back­ground, we prob­a­bly all know a horn when we see or hear about it. That said, Lise Win­er's dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish/Cre­ole of T&T pro­vides a de­f­i­n­i­tion: to horn is to cuck­old; com­mit adul­tery; have a re­la­tion­ship out­side of an of­fi­cial one.

Such a de­f­i­n­i­tion sug­gests that horn­ing is not equiv­a­lent to flirt­ing. Per­haps they are on the same con­tin­u­um but not like for like. In­ter­est­ing­ly, there is quite a bit of aca­d­e­m­ic lit­er­a­ture on flirt­ing. So­cial sci­en­tists de­scribe flirt­ing as com­plex and sym­bol­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Flirt­ing is the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of a space of pos­si­bil­i­ty. It is to sug­gest, play­ful­ly, in both non-ver­bal and ver­bal ways, that a space of pos­si­ble com­mit­ment ex­ists. Yet this space of pos­si­ble com­mit­ment will more than like­ly nev­er hap­pen be­cause the essence of flir­ta­tion lies in the pos­si­bil­i­ty, not the com­mit­ment to ac­tion.

Ob­vi­ous­ly to sug­gest monogamy is the on­ly or even the most tra­di­tion­al form of re­la­tion­ship flies in the face of ev­i­dence from cul­tures all over the world, in­clud­ing our own. Monogamy is one re­la­tion­ship style among many. And monogamy has come to be un­der­stood cur­rent­ly as the most pop­u­lar, and "nor­mal."

So is horn­ing a lit­tle more di­verse, and var­ied than Win­er's dic­tio­nary de­f­i­n­i­tion? Per­haps for some a horn works as a safe­ty valve to re­lieve pres­sure in a re­la­tion­ship, and for oth­ers it's just plain old cheat­ing while there are oth­er po­si­tions in be­tween and be­yond those too.

The an­thro­pol­o­gist Daniel Miller points out in Tales from Face­book, his book on Tri­nis and how they use Face­book, that to no­tice horn­ing is part of lo­cal cul­ture is not to make a judge­ment about any­thing. Rather it is to ac­knowl­edge that such be­hav­iour has been iden­ti­fied lo­cal­ly over a long pe­ri­od of time. "It is a con­stant as­pect of peo­ple's lives and ex­pec­ta­tions for gen­er­a­tions," as Miller puts it.

This is some­thing that has come up in oth­er re­search too. Cul­tur­al be­hav­iours are learned be­hav­iours. They are en­cul­tur­at­ed, mean­ing chil­dren learn them from their el­ders.So in in­ter­views about "what is horn­ing?" re­spon­dents some­times men­tion that they knew what horn­ing meant even be­fore they were old enough to have prop­er boyfriends or girl­friends.

When asked how they knew that, re­spon­dents said they learnt it at home, or from their fa­thers. "We un­der­stand a horn from lit­tle. It will hap­pen to all of us." It was a small sam­ple–noth­ing con­clu­sive–but it does sug­gest that horn­ing as an idea and be­hav­iour is some­thing cir­cu­lat­ing cul­tur­al­ly.

On Face­book, when in­for­ma­tion is post­ed and tagged, vague fears and sce­nar­ios about horn­ing can float in­to the minds of peo­ple in re­la­tion­ships. One side ef­fect of this might be an in­crease in the num­bers of part­ners who stalk their oth­er half's Face­book pages, friends or re­la­tion­ship sta­tus changes.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, the word "friend," so com­mon to both Face­book and horn­ing cul­ture, pos­es con­sid­er­able se­man­tic am­bi­gu­i­ty here, pro­vid­ing ev­i­dence of how tech­nol­o­gy and lo­cal cul­ture can over­lap in nov­el, un­in­tend­ed ways.Ac­cord­ing to Miller, in this new tech­no­log­i­cal era, a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that used to be kept on the out­side of one's pe­riph­ery, in the faint, dis­tant parts of one's con­scious­ness, is no longer kept so far away. In the era of Face­book it could be said the fear of be­ing horned now feels much clos­er.

�2 Dr Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an is an an­thro­pol­o­gist at UWI, St Au­gus­tine