Reflections on Caribbean peasantries

Abstract

REFLECTIONS ON CARIBBEAN PEASANTRIES 1Consisting of perhaps fifty separate countries and territories, most of them insular but not all; the oldest colonial sphere in the European world outside Europe, conquered, settled and "developed" by a dozen different powers -the Caribbean region discourages ambitious attempts at comparison.Not surprisingly the application of the concept of the peasantry to the Caribbean region has so far been rather limited in character.The peasantry is not an old-fashioned subject of study for anthropologists; in the Caribbean region, it is a relatively new concern.Before World War II, and even for a few years afterward, American anthropological interest there was confined mainly to folklore and to the Afro-American tradition, exemplified by the work of such scholars as Melville and Frances Herskovits (e.g.1936), Martha Beckwith (e.g.1924), and Manuel Andrade (e.g.1930).'Beckwithalso produced both an interesting monograph on Jamaican village life, which was the first of its kind (1929), and a short and important study of ethnobotany in that country (1928).But her pioneering work was for long not imitated.On the British side there was little of interest to Caribbean anthropologists before the War.Afterward, and parallel to the North American unconcern with the peasantry, there was on the British side an almost obsessive interest in social organization, particularly in forms of union, the family and the domestic group, probably best exemplified by the work of Raymond T. Smith in then-British Guiana (1956), and the monographs by Michael G. Smith (e.g.1962), Edith Clarke (1957) and others.The first substantial monograph on a Caribbean peasantry by an anthro-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.