Marginalized peoples and Creole Genesis

The tendencies toward decontextualization, mono-causal scenarios, and the erasure of the agency of marginalized peoples that have been identified and criticized in the preceding chapters are more often than not due more to the outmoded paradigm of science within which most linguists and other social scientists still do their work, rather than being due to any lack of intelligence, preparation, honesty, or social conscience on the part of creolists. In this chapter we make a preliminary case for moving beyond the ‘Cartesian Linguistics’ model which still dominates our field toward new ways of looking at languages and accounting for the complex behaviors of their speakers.