The Editor, Sir:

We, Anthony Bogues, Sean Ffrench, Obika Gray and Horace Levy, want here to publicly disengage from the Taking Responsibility: Jamaica Economy Project (JEP) and to express our firm opposition to its stated positions.

Through Horace as team organiser, we were invited to be part of a multi-disciplinary project, the JEP. Our team focused on the broad component of culture. The idea announced was for a scholarly study of the relationships and interactions between a range of components - economy, political leadership, culture, institutions, criminology, foreign policy - that could inform a non-partisan, public discourse.

When in November of this year a Draft Final Report was circulated, we were amazed to discover that not only did it ignore the various contributions offered by our group, but that it was narrowly economic, conveying many of the standard and distorted positions about the history and character of the Jamaican economy.

Only the most myopic narrow view of society today in a world, where multi-disciplinary and cross boundary approaches are critical for understanding any society, could propose that what was necessary for transforming Jamaican society were purely economic interventions. All societies are constructed not only around their material basis but upon ways of life, upon ways in which people think about themselves, about ideas which motivate behaviour, as expressed in class, colour, gender, religion and popular culture. One object of interdisciplinary research is to grapple with how these ideas and their expressions may or may not influence or be influenced by economic matters. In the draft document and its public handouts these structural features of Jamaican society receive only marginal reference. We think that this is a mistake not only of scholarship but also of analysis.

The Jamaica Economy Project really attempted to understand the question it posed to itself at the beginning - why has Jamaica underperformed (economically, that is)? It was not open to another more central question, repeatedly put to it - what is the nature of the crisis in Jamaica? To elucidate the latter would have required a less blinkered approach.

For our part, given the central question we think needs answering, the nature of the current crisis, we will continue to work on what we call The Jamaica Nation Project, and to do so under the aegis of the Centre for Caribbean Thought. We hope to make sober and realistic assessments of where we are as a nation, considering both its historical origins and its contemporary expressions, and to encourage wide public input and debate on them.

We are, etc.,

ANTHONY BOGUES, Professor of Africana

Studies and Political Science, Brown University;

Distinguished Fellow, Center for African Studies,

University of Cape Town; Associate

Director, Center for Caribbean Thought, UWI

SEAN FFRENCH, Lecturer, Department of

Sociology, Psychology and Social Work,

UWI Mona

OBIKA GRAY, Professor of Political Science,

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

HORACE LEVY, Lecturer (part-time),

Department of Sociology, Psychology and

Social Work, UWI.

jenhal@cwjamaica.com, Kingston 6