Letter: Batabano shows how a parade becomes a commons

The moment a costume reaches the road, it stops being only the wearer’s property. Batabano brings costume bands, music and street procession into Grand Cayman’s public space. Like other Caribbean carnivals, it asks private groups to spend money and labour on something whose value peaks when it is exposed to a crowd.

Franz Boas’s work among peoples of the Northwest Coast of Canada made potlatch central to the anthropology of exchange. The important point is not the old caricature of people destroying wealth. Potlatch connects giving to witnesses, standing, kinship, obligation and communal memory.

No historical relationship should be invented between potlatch and carnival. The comparison is instead a test of economic vocabulary. Both make more sense when public goods, reputation and belonging are treated as real forms of return.

A commons does not mean that nobody pays. It means that the final value is difficult to exclude other people from. Streets, sound, colour, attention and atmosphere spill beyond the people who bought costumes, built floats or paid dues.

That spillover is precisely why carnival can justify both private sacrifice and public support. Participants receive reputation and belonging. Businesses receive activity. Spectators receive access to a spectacle. A city receives an identity that no single organiser can own.

The difficult question is how to keep the exchange reciprocal. Public costs, cleanup, access and local participation still matter. A gift economy becomes exploitative if the same people are always expected to give while others collect the durable return.

This perspective also guards against a lazy use of the word potlatch. Northwest Coast ceremonial traditions deserve to be understood on their own terms. Comparison is valuable only when it clarifies both sides rather than pretending they are the same.

The parade is successful when the crowd feels that the spectacle belongs to them too.

Charles E. A. Lincoln IV