The Koromantee dance began with an introductory walking around in a loose circle. Partners then faced each other and began to do a step much like an Irish reel, hands on hips, hopping from one foot to the other, feet turned out at right angles. They came together and separated then they grabbed each other at the waist and ran circles around each other first one way, then the other. That then gave way to what is called 'bush-fighting' "crouching down and advancing in line to attack an imaginary enemy with many feints, swerves and much pantomime"

Jonkunnu (also spelt Jonkonnu, John Canoe, John Konno and John Canou) can be traced back to the 'free' time given to slaves during the Christmas holidays. Jonkunnu performances occurred between Christmas and New Year as the slaves celebrated their freedom with dances and festivals.

The traditional set of Jonkonnu characters included the horned 'Cow Head', 'Policeman', 'Horse Head', 'Wild Indian', 'Devil', 'Belly-woman', 'Pitchy-Patchy' and sometimes a 'Bride' and 'House Head', who carried an image of a great house on his head.

Although Jamaica is credited with the longest running tradition of Jonkunnu, today these mysterious bands with their gigantic costumes appear more as entertainment at cultural events than at random along our streets. On Sunday, the bands marked their return at this time of year by being a part of the Jonkunnu Mento Festival put on by the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC). The groups present for the festival marched from the Marketplace on Constant Spring Road to the Ranny Williams Entertainment Centre. They were unusual enough to catch the attention of onlookers.

Between Half-Way Tree and the Ranny Williams Entertainment Centre, traffic slowed as the bands from Westmoreland, St. Ann, St. Mary, St. Elizabeth and Kingston caught the attention of onlookers, some of whom were witnessing a Jonkunnu parade for the first time.

"That I would come into their midst, able to worship these gods in dance ... confirming to them that segments of family, relatives known to have been separated from them and carried to some land vaguely north, others vaguely south, seemed to be of utmost importance.

In 1935, Katherine Dunham began her "Great Experience" in the Caribbean, with Haiti as the center of her intellectual and spiritual search. Her initial field trip lasted slightly less than one year; she returned in following years to perform, recuperate from strenuous tours, provide medical services, and, at intervals, reside.

Haiti was at first an outpost but later at the heart of her spiritual home, which encompasses those places in which her creative self lives and flourishes. On her first trip, she arrived with great anticipation and hope and experienced the joys and excitement of learning and relating to likable and gracious people. She also encountered the miseries of physical and mental ordeals and humiliations.

When anthropologists talk about their field studies, they often speak in the possessive mode: "my village," "my community." The places they refer to in this way are actually joint creations of fieldworkers and the people with whom they work, reflecting the relative breadth and depth of their connections in the culture.

The island Dunham came to possess is based on intense relationships with Haitians throughout an extended period of residence and visits and is shaped by dreams, plans, and hopes. Her conception has been modified through the years as her knowledge has increased, and it reflects much of the reality of the Haitian's homeland. Haitians understand this. Writing to her for published materials in 1937, Alan Lomax, who was collecting folk music for the Library of Congress, commented, "Cécile and Théoline [sic] and Cicerón and Dr. Reeser all seemed to think you were the only real collector who ever came to Haiti.

In initiation ceremonies, elders guide and advise acolytes through their passage into adult responsibility or into deeper wisdom and knowledge of cultural values. Dunham's practice of seeking out those with the knowledge and skills she desired and then listening to and following their counsel gave her a strong advantage in her fieldwork and led her into many initiation experiences, as did her ability to participate in dance.

In late May 1935, she made an initial visit to Haiti, where, as she informed Herskovits in a letter, she rode at the Jockey Club in Petionville, the wealthy district of the capital. She also reported attending a feast for the ancestors of a man who, she wrote, "allowed me to shake the rattle over them [bottles of water for ancestors] after a long discourse in creole to the effect that we were all of the same origin, and since I too was from African descent, he was glad to let me be present so that I would be able to tell the brothers in America."

In July, she traveled to Jamaica, where she stayed for a month with the Maroon peoples in the village of Accompong. Here truly began her first stage of initiation into the status of anthropologist (in contrast to student of anthropology), that is, psychological separation from her accustomed environment. Traveling into the mountains on a little train winding through "tangled green forests" and "sharp, sudden valleys," she sat beside "a bandannaed old lady with a crateful of travel-sick chickens; two silent East Indian men; [and] a father in mourning with three little children," she reported. "[I] couldn't help but feel a strange ecstasy as though all of the steel-mill drabness of Joliet, Illinois, and the dark winter pinch of Chicago, and the confusion and bewilderment of New York City were sliding rapidly downhill and right off Kingston Bay into the ocean."

With separation came culture shock. Her first night away from the tourist's Caribbean itinerary was a sleepless and terrifying one; she felt alone, alien, and unprepared. Herskovits had briefed her to some extent, but he himself had visited with the Maroons for only short periods, and no outsider to her knowledge had stayed with them for longer than a night.

The Maroons of Accompong have an ambivalent history of rebellion and loyalty in their relations with the English. A populace made up of captives who had escaped slavery, as well as slaves who had revolted and run away into the mountains, they have a tradition of fierceness in battle and independence of spirit. Through their guerrilla strategies, they forced the British to sign a treaty allowing them to live in peace in their own territory. To maintain their independence, they kept the terms of the treaty and supported the English during subsequent slave revolts. Largely as a result of their political caution, they were the sole surviving Maroon community.

This enforced fealty to their natural enemies had caused the people of Accompong to be very secretive and distrustful of outsiders. The performance of the Koromantee war dance may have been perceived by colonial authorities as threatening, even though many years had passed since their rebellion and radical political actions. As is often the case with isolated people under the constant threat of cultural and physical extinction, they were dominated by a strong leader. Spontaneous expressions of African rituals were discouraged. Through officially sanctioned performances, Colonel Simon Rowe attempted to control, legitimize, and thus render historically meaningless Maroon cultural expressions, a fact that Zora Hurston noted in her account.

In these circumstances, the beginning fieldworker was seriously challenged. Feeling her lack of experience, Dunham opted for a prudent approach: "The uncertainty of everything and the real lack of preparatory material ... made me decide that I would simply examine what I could of their total life and recount each day as it happened." 6 She would "wait patiently for the music and dances and not get in the way." 7 The newcomer's response of lying low to avoid being humiliated, harming others, or jeopardizing one's mission is a tactic practiced by anthropologists, Peace Corps volunteers, or anyone who has been sensitized to cultural and value differences. Dunham had learned the value of patience from her mentors, as well as from her childhood experiences: "Though reports had it that the Maroon people were reluctant to reveal themselves to outsiders, and evasive about arriving at fact, I was sure that my childhood in Joliet, Illinois, had equipped me with enough patience to outwait them."

Besides patience, other traits, including her love of dance, ultimately led to acceptance and the coveted opportunity to view the Koromantee war dance. Toward the end of her stay, the people she "could not imagine" dancing when she first met them, performed traditional dances for her, including the Koromantee. She had almost given up hope, having been promised by Colonel Rowe—to whom Herskovits had written a letter of introduction for her—that she would be able to see the dances, but with no results. Initially, she saw only the "set dances," social dances without the historical reference of the war dance. Apprehensive that she had not gained the confidence of the people, she worried that this was an omen of failure for her fieldwork in the Caribbean. But fate intervened in her favor. She had been promised a drum, which had not materialized, and following her instincts, she went to seek out the one who was making it. At his place, she found some of the villagers getting ready for a dance. The colonel—whom Dunham referred to as the "old curmudgeon" in a letter to Herskovits, was conveniently out of the village: "He was very vexed before I left because I was finding out too much."

Such seemingly fortuitous circumstances as Dunham experienced occur as if by magic to those in the field as a result of deep involvement in a community, and they are invariably sources of the richest materials. At first miffed at apparent betrayal by her friends, since she seemed to have stumbled on their secret by chance, she rapidly overcame her feelings and threw herself into the most fulfilling experience a fieldworker can have: that of touching the deep roots of a people's life. "[O]n the eve of my departure all that I could have hoped for fell into perfect order, and in abundance," she later wrote. With the wisdom gained from years of relating to people of different cultures, she commented, "People and nature have a way of testing before giving up their secrets."

Dunham's fieldwork account recorded the drama of her experience. Redfield commented on the draft she sent to him, "It is a vivid record of a personal experience. It is provided with two threads or themes, that give it some literary form, involving—almost—suspense and resolution." The two themes he mentioned were the successful search for desired knowledge and the growth of affection between researcher and people studied: "These are ... the two perennial experiences of the field ethnologist that make the work exciting and human." He commended her for giving "the impression, bright and strong, of the look and smell and feel of Accompong," unconsciously, perhaps, breaking into rhyme.

It is instructive to speculate why Dunham was more successful in tapping these African sources than Hurston, who also practiced patience. In Dunham—who candidly expressed a desire to learn about traditional ways—the people saw an opportunity to instruct one of the "lost" Africans of North America, and they also recognized in her a ready and apt student of dance. Behaving with characteristic African indirectness, they provided her with an exciting climax for her visit. In essence, they set the agenda of her future career when they directed her to share her knowledge with the other "lost people of Nan Guinée."

In choosing Accompong for her first entry into Caribbean society, Dunham was unquestionably plunging into a preserve of African cultural origins in a move that anticipated her venture into the challenging regions of the religious life of Haitian peasants. She had now seen something of the "real" Caribbean culture and would not be trapped by the surface that was a survival of colonialism, although she observed and wrote about that aspect of Haitian society as well. Her concern about falling short of her goals in Accompong suggested that she felt the journey was a trial effort for her work in the West Indies.

In the intensified learning situation that even a short time spent in a new culture can provide, Dunham absorbed many things in Accompong that contributed to her understanding of African culture and cultural differences generally. She learned that people in folk societies tend to communicate plans differently and less openly—especially where authorities are opposed—than do those in complex societies, where performances are widely advertised in advance. This knowledge would stand her in good stead as she sought out sacred rites throughout the world. She discovered that the people of Accompong danced for the sheer perfection of artistry; the old women were the most favored because they were the most accomplished. Segregation by age was unknown, with old and young mingling except when artificially separated by school or sports events.

Having learned about African societies from Herskovits and her other teachers, she was able to perceive African elements in Caribbean societies. She saw firsthand the social importance of work groups in Jamaica and Haiti, as in West Africa, and the storytelling skills in narrating the African "nansi" tales. Through her initiation into obi (obeah), in a ceremony she induced one of her Maroon friends to perform, she learned about the African-based respect for the spirit world, especially ancestral spirits. The Maroon people, she believed, possessed a more African-oriented religious conception than did many of the other Jamaicans, who were influenced by revivalistic "possession" cults that had spread throughout the West Indies with the coming of Christianity: "The frank and friendly relationship between man and his gods reminds me of the more subtle side of the African religion. 'Me Cyarry me god inside me,' Simon Rowe said when I playfully chided him for not going to church."

A practical attitude toward sexuality; customs surrounding birth, death, and naming practices, such as the use of day names; and the tendency toward polygyny all revealed an African background. While the Maroons were proud of some of their African traditions, they were ashamed of others, a condition that reflected their conflicting political and social experiences. They wanted to appear progressive, yet they were not quite ready to give up all the old ways, the investigator noted. Above all, the warmheartedness, the reciprocity, and the strong social supports she experienced caused her to recognize a collectivist spirit more akin to African than to more individualistic Western societies.

Individuals Dunham came to know in Accompong were named and vividly characterized in Journey to Accompong, her published account. Her interest in people and her ability to describe something of their essential natures, so apparent in her memoirs and in her description of Haitian society in Island Possessed were already present in this early work. Ralph Linton noted in his introduction to Journey to Accompong, "Miss Dunham presents them as friendly and delightful people.... In this book one gets not only a picture of an interesting and unusual society, but of warm and living personalities."

Dunham was able to film the Koromantee, as well as dances in Martinique and Haiti. She sent films to Herskovits, who commented that two or three of the dance sequences were "splendid" but that some were obscure. In her answer, she expressed dismay about his reference to "that picture where men are hopping about very fast," which was the Koromantee. Not being a dancer and unaware of the context, he did not see what she had experienced. In Martinique, where she traveled when she left Jamaica, she recorded the Ag'Ya, which Dunham described as "an acrobatic dance that much resembles the Dahomean thunder dance" and the beguine. 17 Herskovits commented, "I think the Ag'Ya is one of the most finished and exciting dances I have ever seen and you have enough of it so that you should have no difficulty in training people to do it." 18 He also felt that the film of the beguine had the "makings of an extremely interesting film." 19 These sophisticated dances were more familiar to him than were the movements of the Maroon peasants.

Dunham's objective was not merely to record dances and make good films but also to understand the social role of dance. She wrote to Herskovits, "Unless I'm dealing with purely social affairs, [I] must go easy on the equipment. I've seen the difference between something staged and something real, and besides people don't like [filming] ... if they're doing something serious."

She remarked twenty years later, "In Martinique—I was all dancer and little scientist," being attracted to the festivals, dance halls, rhythms, and laughter of the island. She translated much of this excitement to the stage: "From Martinique came the ball L'agya [sic] with its creole gaiety, its vivid festival scene, of the Mazurka, the beguine, and majumba, its zombie Forest, its superstition and its tragic ending."

In Trinidad, Dunham remarked on the active practice of Congo, Dahomey, and Yoruba religions and observed the shango, or eight-day sacrifice practiced to win court trials or to get well, dedicated to a Yoruba god. She studied the secular dances, as well: the calypso, with remnants of lewd songs and dances, and the paseo, showing Spanish influence.

In one of her letters, she half-humorously commented on the opportunism required of the serious fieldworker: "[I am] a little ashamed of my tactics gathering data. [I] have become a regular gold digger for worming material and practical assistance out of men and old ladies."

When Dunham returned to Haiti, she had accomplished the objectives she had set for herself. She had tested her courage and skill in the mountains of Jamaica and had observed dances rich in vitality and sensuality and exhibiting the eclecticism of Caribbean cultural life. She was ready for the supreme challenge, she told her mentor: "If all goes well in Haiti, I shall have a little controversy with you, I think. I shall try to be initiated which means that I will probably have to do away with the typewriter and picture machine for a while."