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The Italian theorist of elites, Gaetano Mosca, once observed that animals are not classified according to the colour of their skin but by something rather more important, their anatomic structure. On the other hand, status among humans is often assigned not on essentials but on what he called "mere trivialities and appearances". What, he asked, were the consequences of schemes inspired by altogether superficial criteria? I am not aware that Mosca ever fully answered the question. Harry Hoetink dedicated much of his intellectual life to an attempt to explain how and why trivialities such as skin colour and physical appearance became the dominant classificatory principle in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Hoetink came to this line of study by theoretical training and personal experience. Born in Groningen (Northern Netherlands) in 1931, he did a master's degree in Social Geography at the University of Amsterdam and then, in 1958, a PhD in Humanities at the University of Leiden. It was arguably this "mixed genre", as Pierre Bourdieu would call interdisciplinary work, that allowed Hoetink to escape the dulling effects of a sociology that had already been routinized into this or that "discipline" or - even more reductionist - "school". His was an education based on Dutch culture historians such as Huizinga, Romein, Geyl, and Germans such as Weber, Simmel and Marx, all read in the original.
His dissertation, "Het Patroon van de ondse Curacao samenleving" ("The Pattern of Old Curacao Society"), was never translated but much of it was incorporated into his next book, which appeared first in Dutch and was then translated as Two Variants of Caribbean Race Relations: A Contribution to...