J Latin Amer Carib Anth - 2022 - Jayaram - Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of Is Lands

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of
(Is)lands
[A sea of islands] is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the
totality of their relationships.
—Epeli Hau’ofa (1993)
Anniversaries, if commemorated, can connect the past, present, and future.

This year, we celebrate the fifteenth year anniversary of JLACA’s name change
from JLAA to the present title, thus marking the official inclusion of the Caribbean
within its purview. As Guest Editors for this In-Focus Issue on Caribbean Anthro-
pology, or rather the plural Caribbean Anthropologies (Papailias and Gupta 2021;
Valladares and Igreja 2021), we are pleased to inaugurate this collection of schol-
arly works with this Introduction. The concept for this issue was the brainchild
of Quetzil Castañeda, JLACA Editor-in-Chief from 2018 to 2022. He assembled
us as a crew of Guest Editors, explained to us the expectations, and authorized us
to set sail on what was to become a two-year voyage.1 Though Castañeda trusted
our judgment, he always made sure he kept current with the issue’s development.
In advocating for and helping bring the issue to fruition, he demonstrated his re-
spect for institutional memory. In celebrating the Caribbean in the Journal as a
non-Caribbeanist, he eschewed the parochialism rampant in area studies in the
Americas. By including a junior scholar (a person of color) as a guest editor, he en-
couraged active incorporation of younger, more diverse Caribbeanist anthropolo-
gists. This anniversary issue indeed shows reason to celebrate and give thanks.2
Retrospective regret can occur after finalizing a publication just as well as upon
leaving the field, as our experience taught us. As we reviewed the “World An-
thropology” section of American Anthropologist from its inception in 2013 to the
present, only one issue (vol. 121, no. 3) concentrated on the Caribbean (i.e., Cuba).
Within the rest of the series, the coverage of the Americas heavily favors Brazil and
Argentina, perhaps due in part to their robust institutional support for the dis-
cipline. Consequently, from early in our planning, the editorial group wanted to
use the Anniversary Issue to promote JLACA as a venue where Caribbeanists from
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 186–213. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. © 2022 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12624
186 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

around the world could publish their scholarship. We had hoped to include various
homologous Caribbean scholarly traditions (anthropologies, antropologías, eth-
nologies, antropologie, cultural geographies, sociologías). As we explain later,
though, the final product was not as regionally diverse as we would have wished.
However, we were able to integrate a degree of plurality of scholarly representa-
tion, as this issue’s scholastic sancocho mixes places of origin (Caribbean, Europe,
U.S.) with places of training (Caribbean, Europe, U.S.) differently for many of these
authors.3 Much more must be done, but we did what we could.
This preliminary essay introduces the Issue while also making a substantive
contribution to anthropological scholarship on the meaning of the Caribbean. We
begin with a discussion of the term’s valence in light of the confusions and para-
doxes that introduced the region to the world, with special mention of the work of
Sidney Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Next, we move to the manner in which
the Caribbean has been shown to extend between the global and the local as well
as surpass existing intellectual conventions through writings by Karla Slocum and
Deborah Thomas, and by David Scott. Then, we pivot to an examination of what
the Caribbean has meant through analysis of publication content before and after
the inclusion of the term in the Journal’s name. After digests of the Research Arti-
cles, we describe the two novel forms of contributions to this issue: ethnographic
insights through sound and brief reflections by a good number of international
Caribbeanists on what they perceive as the major tasks in the field.
What’s in a Name
“From the very beginnings of its history in the late fifteenth century, there has
been vexatious confusion concerning the definition, both geographical and cul-
tural, of the Caribbean region.” So opens Gordon K. Lewis’s (1983, 1) magisterial
history of Caribbean thought. Much of this confusion starts with Columbus, the
figure through whom, as Fernando Ortiz (1942) once put it, two worlds discovered
each other, albeit it under conditions that granted one of them —the Early Mod-
ern Mediterranean— uniquely superior powers to inscribe itself upon places and
peoples whose names and identities were obliterated in the encounter.4
Though “Carib” and “Taino” nowadays serve as ethnic autonyms for indige-
nous enclaves in Dominica, and the neo-Taino Movement (Feliciano Santos 2021),
both of these terms, as well as the more general appellation “Indians,” or place
names such as “Antilles” and “West Indies” originate in Columbian confusions.
And vexatious they are, indeed. For while archaeologists have long come to as-
similate the former set of terms to phaseological (not ethnic, mind you!) distinc-
tions in the cultural history of some pre-contact island populations, none of the
people whom Columbus encountered ever called themselves “Taino,” “Arawak,”
Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 187

or “Carib.” The first is simply a Spanish corruption of “nitayno” (also nitaino,
mitaino), the designation of the indigenous elite on the island that Columbus
named Santo Domingo, and that would later become known as Hispaniola. Al-
though the second (Arawak) circulated in forms such as aruacas or arhuacos in the
early Spanish colonial period, its connection with the (by then) so-called Tainos
was stabilized only in the second half of the nineteenth century when Daniel G.
Brinton, on the basis of comparing early Spanish word lists with the language of
the Guyanese Lokono established the designation Island Arawak (Rouse 1992, 5).
The third, however, is the result of a monumental —and long-lasting— confusion
of tongues, and this is what concerns us here.
As the German ethnohistorian and philologist Friederici’s ([1947] 1960, 143,
translation ours) encyclopedic Amerikanistisches Wörterbuch tells us,
In the diaries of Columbus first two voyages of discovery which first acquainted us
with the Caribs and their name, the admiral and Dr. Chanca use the word in eight
different forms, canibales, caribales, caniba, canima, cariba, caribe, cariby, carib, in
pretty much unmotivated order and without any discernible reason that would give
certainty about dialectological differences in the sociolects of the American natives,
the absence of any real communicative understanding with the natives being the
decisive reason.
Reconstructing some of the possible ideological templates informing the joint

emergence into European languages of the words “carib” and “cannibal,” Peter
Hulme (1986) has argued that Columbus’ fixation on Marco Polo, and his con-
viction of having made landfall close to the seat of the Grand Khan of Cathay, led
him to interpret indigenous utterances about a place called caniba in line with the
phonetics of “el gran can,” and apparent report of abductions of people by “gente de
caniba” (hence the Spanish derivative caníbales) as incursions by the army of the
Khan. The connection to what Pliny, Strabo and others had called anthropophagi,
only stabilizes toward the end of Columbus’ first voyage. But from then on, what
begins to emerge is a strategic distinction between “indios” (tractable natives, soon
glossed by the indigenous word “guatiao,” i.e., “friend”) and hostile natives around
whom the term “caribe/caribes” began to coalesce as a license for subjugation and
enslavement.5
What adds an astonishing wrinkle is that Friederici’s (1960, 144) painstaking
analysis of the post-contact sources suggests a possible indigenous Arawak seman-
tic field for terms like “carib” that comprises adjectives like “strong, brave, enter-
prising, more powerful than others, dexterous, clever, smart, wise, supernatural,
holy.” For what he concludes is that “carib” and its permutations in Spanish or
Latin chronicles may have designated 1) strong and powerful groups of conquer-
ers; 2) shamans or otherwise supernaturally endowed ritual specialists; and 3) the
white Europeans in which the natives perceived the qualities associated with the

word “carib.” Friederici’s Eurocentric tendencies notwithstanding, we are forced to
ask ourselves: were then Columbus and his successors the original Caribbeans in
the eyes of the natives? In a morally repulsive sense, they were treacherous guests
who, as Sidney Mintz (1966) once put it, all but exterminated the indigenous pop-
ulation, and then transformed themselves into the violent hosts of upwards of 5
million enslaved Africans who came to repopulate the island Caribbean in the
course of the operation of what Phillip Curtin (1969, 1) called “The South Atlantic
System.” Curtin defined this system as “a complex economic organism centered
on the production in the Americas of tropical staples for consumption in Europe
and grown by the labor of enslaved Africans,” and it came to lastingly shape the
post-conquest societies that emerged in the region. Whatever the Caribbean may
have been in 1492, and whatever the products and unfree labor sources involved,6
it turned into the initial focus and subsequent fulcrum of the emergence of the
Modern Capitalist World System. This is what it became —until, that is, the last
island colony to emancipate its enslaved peoples, Cuba, did so in 1886.
All of which is to say that right from the start, Ortiz’s mutual discovery of two
worlds had paradoxical and ultimately undecidable qualities. Much, if not all of
this, is lost to retrospective reconstruction. But the political-economic, ethnoracial,
and cultural legacy of the history of the emergence of the modern Caribbean gen-
erated by Europe’s earliest ultramarine Atlantic encounters persists in the betwixt-
and-between-ness that to this day characterizes the region. In what remains, to this
day, one of the most succinct early attempts to characterize its anthropologically
most salient features, Mintz (1966, 19f.) pointed toward a central paradox facing
any concerted effort to study the Caribbean from an anthropological vantage point:
The very diverse origins of Caribbean populations, the complicated history of Eu-
ropean cultural impositions, and the absence in most such societies of any firm
continuity of the culture of the colonial power have resulted in a very heteroge-
neous cultural picture. And yet, the societies of the Caribbean —taking the word
“society” to refer here to forms of social structure and social organization exhibit
similarities that cannot possibly be attributed to mere coincidence.
Mintz delineated nine features that, in his view, accounted for such Caribbean re-
gional commonalities: all except one —“lowland, subtropical insular ecology”—
tellingly related to a history of exceedingly long and violent agroindustrial colonial
domination. A few years later, Mintz (1968, 306) put it even more succinctly. The
“general historical and sociological features” that contemporary Caribbean soci-
eties had in common consisted in the facts that:
(a) Aboriginal populations were destroyed or assimilated soon after 1492; (b)
plantation agriculture developed early as an emergent phase of European overseas
capitalism; (c) slavery and contract labor were the main means for productively

relating the workforce to the land; (d) under the plantation system and until about
1835, Africa was the principal source of labor; (e) local cultures often exhibit a
substantial (but unevenly distributed and by no means exclusive) African compo-
nent, and (f) political dependence and European control have persisted with fewer
interruptions than elsewhere in the history of the New World.
As Mintz (1970, 14) indicated elsewhere, the result of these historical commonal-
ities had rendered the region a singularly unattractive subject of study during the
first two-thirds of the twentieth century.
Houses constructed of old Coca-Cola signs, a cuisine littered with canned corned
beef and imported Spanish olives, ritual shot through with the cross and the palm
leaf, languages seemingly pasted together with “ungrammatical” Indo-European
usages, all observed within the reach of radio and television —these are not the
things anthropologists’ dreams are made of.
Mintz’s former student Trouillot (1990) would later sum up the gist of this mis-
match between a discipline-oriented toward the “savage slot” and the socio-
cultural realities of the contemporary Caribbean: it was this seeming conjunc-
tion of the “odd” and the “ordinary” that had militated, for so long, against any
concerted effort to develop a Caribbeanist subdiscipline in our field. By the time
Trouillot (1992) came to write the first-ever essay on Caribbean anthropology in
the disciplinary augury Annual Review of Anthropology, this had begun to change
—less so, however, because the Caribbean had somehow changed (which it, of
course, had), but because anthropologists had come to abandon their discipline’s
former fixation on an object of study characterized by (however fictitious) remote-
ness, isolation, homogeneity, and timeless “authentic primitivity.” “When E.B. Ty-
lor published the first general anthropology textbook in the English language in
1881,” Trouillot (1992, 20) wrote,
Barbados had been “British” for two and a half centuries, Cuba had been “Spanish”
for almost four, and Haiti had been an independent state for three generations —
after a long French century during which it had accounted for more than half of its
metropolis’s foreign trade. These were hardly places to look for primitives. Their
very existence questioned the West/non-West dichotomy and the category of the
native, upon which anthropology was premised.
By the time of Trouillot’s writing, the discipline had come to reorient its focus.
Anthropologists now strained to situate their ethnographic fields in the kind of
“globalizing” and “transnational” histories that had characterized the Caribbean
for almost half of a millennium.7 As Trouillot (1992) saw it then, precisely because
of their “undisciplined” nature, inescapable historicity, heterogeneity, complexity,
fluidity, and global articulation, Caribbean societies represented an “open frontier

in anthropological theory,” revealing the limits of prior conceptualizations of the
region (and its unclear boundaries), and so presenting an opportunity for rethink-
ing significant parts of the discipline’s categorical apparatus.
Caribbeanist Anthropology and The Global/Local Intersections
Yet another decade later, in the essay “Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights
from Caribbeanist Anthropology,” anthropologists Slocum and Thomas (2003)
picked up from where Trouillot had left off. Writing in another disciplinary flag-
ship journal (The American Anthropologist), they argued for the contributions that
an outlook on Caribbean and Caribbeanist anthropology provide to global and
local entanglements. The authors refer to Mintz’s (1998) assertion that, although
transnational processes are paramount, we cannot ignore the existence and rel-
evance of concepts such as region, area, and community because it is precisely
in these local sites “that people create the specificities of their own experiences”
(Slocum and Thomas 2003, 553).8 Slocum and Thomas interrogate how Caribbean
and Caribbeanist anthropology can shed light on key anthropological arguments
about global-local articulations. These include the global interconnectedness and
center-periphery articulations argument, the global system through which local
processes unfold, and the fallacy of the global as unavoidably homogenizing.
As we argued in the previous section, the Caribbean and Caribbeanist an-
thropology offer a powerful way to trace the global in the local precisely because
the Caribbean has always been global—global in terms of its tendencies, its ap-
proaches, its history, and its development. As Slocum and Thomas state, “far from
being isolated, pristine, and uncorrupted by modernity, the Caribbean region had
extensive political and economic relations with Europe and North America be-
cause of its history of colonialism, slavery, and plantation-based export-oriented
agricultural production” (2003, 554). But particular areas within these tendencies
have been spotlighted: social stratification, creolization, colonialism, nationalism,
globalization, and transnational migration. The relevance of the plantation would
remain present in the studies of the region as “a matrix within which to think the
contemporary social-economic problem of the Caribbean” (Scott 2013, 5).
Between the 1920s and 1970s, most North American scholars working in
the Caribbean tended to do so by engaging with individual colonies and coun-
tries. One notable exception is anthropologist Melville Herskovits, whose work
situated Caribbean social and cultural patterns in a broader context, that of
the African diaspora. The former approach contributed to an understanding of
the Caribbean as both heterogeneous and specific, while the latter connected
Caribbean practices with those occurring elsewhere in the African diaspora (see
Palmié, this issue). Because of an overall focus on Caribbean kinship, Caribbean

family, Caribbean gender ideologies, domestic patterns, and economic roles (and
the fact that this research occurred within the context of postwar decolonization ef-
forts), Caribbeanist anthropology remained in dialogue with the discipline at large,
also mainly concerned with family, gender ideologies, domestic patterns, and eco-
nomic roles at the time.
Another outlook on the Caribbean came from the creolization model (Slocum
and Thomas 2003, 555), a model that remains part of debates among Caribbeanist
anthropologists until today (see Palmié, this issue). This model contributed to an
anthropological analysis of broader questions “regarding social change, societal
transformation, and the nature and origins of Caribbean culture” (2003, 556). Of
particular relevance to the development of this model were Sidney Mintz and
Richard Price’s ideas centered on culture change and interculturation (1992). Mintz
and Price proposed that Afro-Caribbean cultural institutions were influenced both
by specific historic and material conditions and by interaction with European cul-
tural institutions. As Slocum and Thomas note, one of the key contributions of this
paradigm is that “it redirects our attention from the elaboration of binary societal
models toward a process that embodies a particular power struggle and that works
through the dynamic articulation of gender, color, class, status, and culture” (557).
In line with the dialogues put forth in this special issue, the creolization model
puts into conversation anglophone research about the Caribbean with scholarship
on the Francophone, Hispanophone, and the Dutch Caribbean. For David Scott,
the creolization model proposed by Kamau Brathwaite in the 1970s brought our
attention to the unity of Caribbean culture and how peoples in the Caribbean were
interconnected from below (2013, 7). As the Martinican poet and essayist Glissant
(1997) put it, what lends the region unity is a submarine “poetics of relation,” ren-
dering it, as his Cuban counterpart Antonio Benitez Rojo (1997) said it, an “island
that repeats itself ” in fractal recombinations.
The very term Caribbean thus localizes concepts of nation, state, nationalism,
transnationalism, and migration that have characterized it, “reflecting the initial
development of the region via the voluntary and involuntary movements of people
from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that began in the fifteenth century,
as well as the vast human mobility that characterizes the contemporary period”
(Slocum and Thomas 2003, 558). Caribbeanist anthropologists were conscious of
the structures and meanings of race, class, status, gender, and culture in these mi-
gratory movements. In analyzing the transnational ties that distinguish Caribbean
migration, Caribbeanist scholars have shown how the global and local are mutually
constitutive at the state, institutional, corporate, and individual levels (559).
While Slocum and Thomas highlight how Caribbeanist anthropology can
contribute to our understanding of the global and the local (and of global studies),
Scott (2013) discusses the study of the Caribbean, which he conceives “as a
geopolitical area of the intellectual imagination, an object of intellectual history”

(2013, 1). For Scott, thinking about Caribbean studies means we are already inside
a conversation with something called “the Caribbean.” But as we tried to point out
earlier, what this name entails is all but certain. In his essay, “On the Question of
Caribbean Studies,” Scott invites us to question the very picture that informs our
imaginaries about that place called the Caribbean as a site of investigation.
Scott refers the reader to M. G. Smith’s seminal essay, “A Framework for
Caribbean Studies,” which was an inaugural moment in Caribbean intellectual his-
tory (see Palmié, this issue). Trained as he was in British structural functionalism,
in this piece, Smith places the domain of “the social” at the center of relevance as
the principal source of both problems and potential colonial interventions. This
is the first moment of reflection when studies of social issues in the Caribbean by
Caribbean intellectuals become paramount in the development of Caribbean stud-
ies. The second moment took place in 1975 with the publication by Kamau Braith-
waite of the essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time.” Here the social sciences
framing is replaced by a humanities framing while recognizing that there were in-
teractions and cross-fertilization between the two disciplinary domains through-
out the intervening years. For Braithwaite, the emphasis on social issues developed
by Smith or the emphasis on the plantation as a unit of analysis developed by nu-
merous scholars (including Lloyd Best and George Beckford) missed the dynamic
character and inner language of the Caribbean cultural experience. He thus invited
a conceptual framework of Caribbean studies that combined the “social arts” with
the “social sciences” (Scott 2013, 5).
On the Journal’s Publishing Trends: A Content Analysis
Marking the fifteenth anniversary of the incorporation of “Caribbean” into this

publication’s title (and its associated Society) occurs at a seemingly paradoxical
moment. On one hand, Area Studies appear to be in decline, under attack, or per-
haps both. Funding for US Department of Education National Resource Centers,
which support Foreign Language and Area Studies programs at universities has
been reduced from $33.9 million in 2010 to $23.7 million for 2022 (Department
of Education 2020; US Government 2022). The forty-fifth President of the United
States proposed defunding all US Department of Education Title VI Area Stud-
ies and Fulbright-Hays programs (OMB 2020). Long-standing university Latin
American and Caribbean Studies programs are being partially dismantled, reor-
ganized, and incorporated into centers for global studies drawing, to a disordi-
nate but administratively largely unrewarded extent, on contributions by anthro-
pology faculty. On the other hand, as mentioned above, the rise of archipelagic
and island9 approaches (Chandler and Pugh 2021; Deloughrey 2001; Roberts
and Stephens 2017; Stephens and Martin-San Miguel 2020) and comparative area

studies (Köllner 2005) suggest that the Caribbean still and again holds much off-
shore relevance. Within this time of rise and fall, attack and mobilization, examin-
ing the Journal’s publication record with regard to Caribbean content will disclose
patterns from which past agendas (see Gomes da Cunha, this issue) and future di-
rections could be discerned.
To conduct a limited content analysis, we generated data using the sampling
frame of all available online publications through the database Anthrosource, span-
ning from 1995 to 2021. This range spreads through the entirety of the Journal of
Latin American Anthropology and all published issues of the JLACA as of the writ-
ing of this editorial essay. We identified 573 writings published in JLAA/JLACA
and used a complete sample of all of them. This choice avoids a periodicity prob-
lem that may exclude special sections focused on the Caribbean. Only substantive
writings were included, that is, no book reviews, film reviews, or brief introduc-
tory editorial statements were included.10 What remains are research articles, com-
mentaries, and responses to them, substantive editorial essays, and writings within
newer categories (e.g., Ethnography In-Sight, Provocations, and Events). We based
an article’s inclusion or exclusion on whether the article’s keywords, title, abstract,
or content has a clear connection to the land or people of the island in the Greater
and Lesser Antilles. This criterion allows for the inclusion of articles on Caribbean
diasporic populations.
The limitations of such an approach should be obvious. Firstly, this discussion
does not examine work from El Mensajero, the Contributions of the Latin American
Anthropology Working Group, or the Latin American Anthropological Review. An
exhaustive analysis of content and history would certainly shed light on important
trends within these publications and across editorships.11 Secondly, as suggested
throughout this issue, definitions of the Caribbean contain political positions. The
choice of focusing on the major archipelago eliminates consideration of any writing
on Providencia, San Andrés, and Santa Catalina.12 Thirdly, only one of the authors
conducted the coding, which creates bias. Lastly, any errors of omission that oc-
curred when posting material would alter the findings, but we conducted our due
diligence to provide what we hold to be a good estimate.
Basic descriptive analysis of the data on publication (see Table 1) reveals im-
portant trends in the publishing history.13 Regarding the quantity of Caribbean-
focused content, from 1995 to 2021, the region has received over eight percent of
the Journal’s coverage. Given that the region accounts for only a fraction of that of
the Americas compared to that of South and Central America, one may be pleas-
antly surprised at such representation (or, alternatively, be disheartened by the mis-
recognition of the region as a part of Latin America, which it decidedly is not). The
table also indicates that, as one would hope, the number of Caribbean-related arti-
cles increased almost 50 percent after the name change. Unfortunately, this statistic

Table 1: Distribution of Articles Across Journals (1995–2021)
Number of
Caribbean-
Number of related
Journal Name Articles Articles % of Total
JLAA 183 19 10.38
JLACA 372 28 7.53
JLAA and JLACA 555 47 8.47
Table 2: Geographic Distribution of Caribbean Scholarship (1995–2021)

Country Number of Articles % of Total
Cuba (including Diaspora) 19 40.43
Jamaica 8 17.02
Puerto Rico 5 10.64
Trinidad and Tobago 5 10.64
Haiti (including Diaspora) 5 10.64
Dominican Republic 3 6.38
Caribbean (in general) 1 2.13
Bahamas 1 2.13
US (West Indian Diaspora) 1 2.13
47 100
tells only part of the story. With the increase in total number of issues per year, and
consequently articles per year, the overall percentage of Caribbean content in the
journal actually decreased by almost 20 percent.
Geographically, three interesting points emerge from the data. First, the geo-
graphic distribution of coverage falls mainly, but not exclusively, within the Greater
Antilles (see Table 2). Second, despite how scholars of Cuba have at times been
questioned on the relevance of their work to the Caribbean or Latin America due
to its supposed exceptionalism (Hernandez-Reguant 2005), Cuba stands out as be-
ing the main country of reference for 40 percent of the articles, more than the
sum of the next three countries combined. Of the countries with the four highest
number of articles, all had an organized collection of articles dedicated to them.
Though Cuba had two collections dedicated to it (vol. 10, no. 2; vol. 14. no. 2),
the remaining ten articles were published independently of each other. Third, geo-
graphic distribution also seems to correlate with language. Leaving aside the article
that discusses the Caribbean as a region, five of the eight remaining countries use
English as an official language.14

Figure 1 Most Frequently Invoked Themes within JLAA/JLACA (1995–2021).
The last trend we present concerns the content of the Journal (see Fig. 1). From
the forty-seven articles, we created a list of 266 keywords, given either by the author
or, in the case where none were listed, by us. After combining some terms into
one (e.g., immigration and migration, diasporic with diaspora), we used the online
program WordArt to generate Fig. 1.
This word cloud represents a visual depiction of the top eleven keywords used
to describe Caribbean-focused publications in the journal, given, let the reader
might failed to notice, the appearance of a ship: the main conduit that, prior to
telegraphy, gave the Caribbean region some communicative unity (mediated, but
by no means exclusively, through metropolitan channels).15 We highlight four
points, an admittedly incomplete analysis. First, diaspora is the most frequently
invoked term (ten articles). As we are no doubt among those Trouillot described
as being “increasingly aware of global flows” (2003, 62), the first term should not
surprise many. In fact, two special issues (vol. 8, no. 2; vol. 15, no. 2) and a sec-
tion of Actualidades (vol. 10, no. 1) involved writings on diasporic populations.
Second, those familiar with scholarship on Caribbean diasporas should not be
surprised that the terms politics, social, and migration form the next cluster of
terms (eight, seven, and seven, respectively). Certainly, many works beyond the
Journal during this timeframe reflect the same trend (e.g., Schiller and Fouron
2004; Jackson 2011). Third, given the recognition of how intersectionality affects
people, the term class surprisingly occurs less frequently than race and gender.
Lastly, economics appears only through the invocation of tourism, despite how

foundational other livelihoods were in early Caribbean anthropological efforts
such as The People of Puerto Rico. These last two points suggest that anthropo-
logical writing on economic topics in the Caribbean may either be less interesting
to scholars or less likely to be submitted to JLACA for publication.
As the above data show and the current issue demonstrates, JLACA remains an
important publication for scholarly work on Caribbean anthropology. Obviously,
academic journals can only publish a subset of the works they receive. Yet the de-
crease in the overall amount of Caribbean-related content raises the question of
how the Journal should strive to better represent the region. Leaving aside the is-
sue of received submissions, for the moment, let us consider some possibilities to
do so.
Representation of both the Caribbean as a region, however broadly or narrowly
defined, and the territories involved need to be considered. The Journal could es-
tablish a policy by which the Caribbean is assured a certain amount of represen-
tation based upon land mass or population compared to the rest of the Americas.
This would most likely reduce the amount of coverage, though. Another possibil-
ity would be instituting a policy that stipulates that the number of publications be
proportionally representative of the geographic focus of SLACA members, but it
is unknown how that would affect the quantity of Caribbean-focused publications
at this time. Moreover, the arbitrary nature of both of these ideas renders them
useless. A simpler approach would be to include a minimum of one Caribbean-
related piece per issue, or alternately, four per year. The simple elegance deceives,
though. Is there such a calculation that we could devise that would allow us to ar-
rive at the sufficient and optimal level of Caribbean representation? The manner
in which to address the “how” question gives way to a related and more pressing
question: why?
In reviewing JLAA/JLACA’s publication record of Caribbean-related material,
it would be sophomoric to state that the Journal needs to do better. Better compared
to what? The question is not rhetorical. Caribbean(ist) scholars have numerous
area studies journals to which they can submit their writing for publication, in-
cluding the New West Indian Guide, Social and Economic Studies, the Canadian
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, Small Axe,
Karib, the Latin American Research Review, and the many academic journals in
Caribbean countries with limited distribution. Beyond that, they may also con-
sider disciplinary journals without an area studies emphasis (American Anthropol-
ogist, Current Anthropology, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Eth-
nos, L’Homme, etc.) which junior scholars may perceive as more career-furthering
venues, or even interdisciplinary journals such as Comparative Studies in Society
and History (CSSH). Improving the Journal in a vacuum, without consideration
of the larger context, sounds eerily similar to many development projects in the
region.

Nevertheless, we pass between the Scylla of carelessness and the Charybdis of
niksen to offer a map toward our destination. The data in the tables above sug-
gest a need to have a robust discussion with SLACA members and Caribbean(ist)
scholars about concrete goals to help JLACA increase not only the impact fac-
tor but also, and more importantly, the connections between members of the
Caribbean(ist) community of scholars around the world. Establishing a global
list of Caribbean(ist) students, scholars, and scholar-practitioners would allow for
Journal outreach and provide the foundation for networking, recruitment, and
mentoring events across national and linguistic borders and regardless of profes-
sional status. It would enable the Journal to have a discussion about what scholars
want from a publication beyond simply a line on their curriculum vitae. This may
lead to revisiting the topic of language of publication. Once such a conversation
happens, we can embark on a worthwhile journey.
And with that, we turn our sights toward the contributions to this issue.
On the Research Articles in this Issue
Earlier JLACA special issues either included an introductory essay or article with
several articles that focused on topics like indigenous ethnicity and rights, mesti-
zaje, peoples of the Colombian Pacific, Cuban geographies, or environmental pol-
itics, or they bundled a research article with several responses to it. Other contri-
butions were unrelated to the topic. For this issue, we decided to chart our own
course. We found such a process immensely rewarding, though not without its
challenges. Originally, we started developing this special issue with a hybrid ap-
proach. We crafted an open call for papers, but we also wanted to invite prominent
and emerging Caribbeanists. The call for papers yielded several abstracts, yet de-
spite receiving a few good submissions, the group decided to change tack. A brain-
storming session led us to identify four broad yet pressing themes on which we
thought scholars might write: the effects of capitalism and colonialism on anthro-
pological knowledge production about the Caribbean; global-local connections
from 1492 and the Columbian Exchange to SARS-CoV-2 and climate change; the
rise of and response to right-wing nationalism; and novel assemblages in response
to the aforementioned forces of political economy, environment, and salubrity.16
Rather than a second open call, we compiled a long list of authors to potentially
invite, one that made sure to include Caribbean-based academics and attempted
to balance geographic coverage, geographic representation, and established versus
emerging scholars. The result of the process of outreach and the crossing of names
off the list, along with one submission from the open call, is this issue’s collection
of Research Articles.

This section opens with Deborah Thomas’ thoughtful and provocative
reflections on what recent work on “the political” in the Caribbean “can teach us”
all (and as in her 2003 essay co-authored with Karla Slocum, that collective plural
explicitly includes non-regionalist anthropologists). Thomas’s deftly takes her aim
at what recent Caribbeanist ethnographic re-conceptualizations reveal about the
theoretical necessity to orient our conception of “sovereignty” away from the state-
focused Leviathanology that so dominated political anthropology in the 1990s and
early 2000s.17
To be sure, the sovereignty of postcolonial microstates has been questioned
by political scientists and economists for a good number of years, and often on
good grounds. But this, or so Thomas cogently argues, is to miss the point. Al-
ready Max Weber had argued that the state had an existence only insofar and up to
the point that citizen-subjects incorporated it in their political imaginary. If so, as
Bonilla (2017) forcefully argued, the very notion of state-centered sovereignty as
the norm from which Caribbean polities appear to diverge may need to be “unset-
tled” as a dated metropolitan fiction.18 What then can we learn from postcolonial
(or neo-colonial) Caribbean societies that were either founded on a configuration
that violently pitted “state against nation” (Trouillot 1990), or experienced an often
disastrous retreat of a neoliberalized (sometimes rentier, more often debtor) state
from its postcolonial promise to safeguard the welfare, security, and other vital
concerns of its citizens (Thomas 2011, 2019)?
The gist of Thomas’s answer may be encapsulated in the title of Kivland’s (2020)
book Street Sovereigns. Dealing as Kivland does with associations of young men
who deliberately and self-consciously, sometimes even violently, take up the task
of “fè leta” (making the state) on the corners of their Bel Air neighborhood, we
get a sense of the horizon’s expectations (in Koselleck’s terms) still possible in a
country where, as Beckett (2020) argues, many cannot help but confront a space
of experience which leads them to conclude that “Haiti is no more.” But in both
cases it is worth keeping in mind Philip Abrams (1988, 82) famously iconoclastic
diagnosis that “the state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political
practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.”
Consequently, what Thomas is after in her discussion of spate of recent Caribbean
ethnographies are perspectives on sovereignty as precarious process rather than a
settled state of affairs: ethnographies that, in focusing on everyday political praxis
(in Abrams’s sense) “privilege the ephemeral, the performative, the affective, and
the nonlinear and unexpected ways that something that feels like sovereignty cir-
culates” (Thomas, this issue, emphasis ours).
Some of Thomas’s examples sit ill, indeed, with conventional wisdom in polit-
ical anthropology: Hannah Garth’s work on the struggle for culinary self-respect
in Cuba, Jovan Lewis’s on internet scamming as a form of historical redress, Lyn-
don Gill’s and Ana-Maurice Lara’s on Caribbean queerness as a struggle for erotic

autonomy, N. Fadeke Castor on the role of orisha worship in the constitution of
an alternative public sphere, and Brent Crosson’s on obeah work as moral experi-
ments with power counterveiling that of the state’s legal and executive agents —all
these may not register much, when it comes to contemporary theories of the polit-
ical, including in anthropology. But that is precisely Thomas’s point: they should.
In the end, Thomas’s message —and again to all of us, Caribbeanists or not—is
clear: “to fully internalize the implications of the insight that sovereignty must be
framed as practice, process, and dialogue, we must abandon the state as its locus
of realization” (Thomas, this issue).
In her state-of-the-art review of Caribbeanist linguistic anthropology of the
last decades, “Voices in a Sea of History: Why Study Language in the Caribbean,”
Kristina Wirtz gently, but rightly chides JLACA for the paucity of contributions
to the politics and poetics of language use in the region that this journal has pub-
lished since its name change in 2006. Such relative neglect of the “Caribbean voice”
in both the linguistic and political sense, Wirtz argues, is tantamount to forgoing
analysis of an important dimension of social and political life in the region. As she
rightly argues (Wirtz, this issue),
To listen to Caribbean voices is to grapple with the necessarily historically and

geopolitically charged relationships between a primarily North American subdisci-
pline of anthropology and a labile, unbounded, and fractal region whose Sea carries
its crisscrossing trajectories of encounter across the oceans of the world.
Caribbean linguistics was born under the bad sign of an imperial linguistic
ideology for which Wirtz takes as emblematic the British traveler J. A. Froude’s
disparaging 1897 assessment of the absence of any locally rooted languages and
the alleged incapacity of its inhabitant to live up to metropolitan standards. But
one might begin a genealogy of endeavors at assessing the linguistic ecology of the
region with the German neogrammarian-renegade Hugo Schuchardt’s 1889 near-
contemporary assessment of “Sklaven- und Dienersprachen” (languages of slaves
and servants) as not just “broken languages”, but as new sui generis languages wor-
thy of analysis. Despite his undeniable nineteenth-century racism, Schuchardt was
the first to point out that the “bastardized” versions of the languages that European
colonizers aimed to implant in their Caribbean possessions had taken on a life of
their own.
In the process of the enforced adoption of the colonizers’ languages by diverse
subject populations (Native Americans, Gaelic speaking Irish indentured ser-
vants, Norman- or Breton-speaking French engagés, enslaved speakers of dozens
of African languages, late-comer bound laborers from South Asia or China, or
even Arabic-speaking migrants from the Levant) the languages of their masters
underwent various and complex processes of indigenization. What resulted was a
plethora of “creoles” (themselves often stratified into basi-, meso-, and acrolectal

varieties), but also locally inflected versions of the colonizer’s language (such as
Cuban, Puertorican, and Dominican Spanish). These are characterized not just
by a phonology all of their own, but by lexical Amerindianisms and Africanisms
that the Real Academia de la Lengua Española has been reluctant to recognize.
The same, of course, holds for the Oxford English Dictionary, or the Academie
Française.
None of this, however, is yet to say anything about Wirtz’s main theme: how
the languages and modes of speaking of a polyglot and “varilingual” Caribbean
function in daily local life. No matter their language repertoire or the register of it
that Caribbean speakers may choose at any moment, we need to ask:
What people do with language, and what does it mean to them? How do differently
positioned people, individually and in groups, navigate social affiliation, difference,
inequality, and political claims in and through language? (Wirtz, this issue)
There are eminent grounds for asking these questions, and Wirtz demonstrates
this by reviewing a goodly number of recent ethnographies of Caribbean modes of
speech and communication, language ideologies, registers, and their indexicalities
in establishing ethnic, racial, and class identity claims, expressing historical visions,
reclaim ancestral heritage, contest racist or gendered forms of marginalization, or
voice political dissent. More than anything else, her contribution is an eloquent
exhortation to listen to a varied chorus of Caribbean voices, be they of vernacular
or, indeed, scholarly nature.
The next article comes from Stephan Palmié. He provides what he admits
to be a “situated” and not definitive genealogy of Caribbeanist anthropology
based upon his professional career and near four-decade ethnographic engage-
ment with Cubans in Miami and in Cuba. Through describing the ways in which
the Caribbean has been framed and studied, he makes the point that “changing
social worlds do not so much invalidate (unchanging) prior scholarship, than turn
it into evidence —not just of changing social worlds, but of the equally changing
anthropological imagination” (this issue).
Intersecting with what we described above, Palmié discusses the Caribbean
as a geohistoric creation. Going against those scholars who would start analysis
with the Caribbean as a homogenous region or build models based upon historical
commonalities (e.g., Hispanic Caribbean), he supports Mintz’s claim of a socio-
cultural region due to shared local specificities. Yet even this requires a temporal
consideration, for the truism that things change over time holds for the invention
of all of what makes up the Caribbean, yet not at the same rate.
Palmié continues his discursive genealogy by presenting three contributing el-
ements to the foundations of Caribbeanist anthropology. According to him, writ-
ings by early Anglophone, Francophone, or Hispanophone indigenous intellectu-
als were either “confined to the exigencies of insular national cultural projects or

were geared towards an elucidation of the region’s pivotal historical role in the mak-
ing of global capitalist modernity” (this issue). After brief mention of early U.S. an-
thropologists working on Africanisms and survivals in the Caribbean (Herskovits,
Beckwith, Parsons, Hurston), he describes two “moments” of anthropological be-
ginning in the Caribbean, both situated in the Cold War context. The first is the
debate in Caribbeanist anthropology on the nature of cohesion in Caribbean soci-
eties between M. G. Smith with his pluralism and coercion in the British colonies
versus R. T. Smith and his notion of hegemonic values. The second moment was
the Peoples of Puerto Rico project by Julian Steward. Palmié pivots from the identi-
fying oversights in the study to highlighting recent forward-thinking scholarship
using a “post-plantation” approach (Robotham 2018).
Palmié closes by sharing his doubts about scholars’ use of the Caribbean as a
metonym for humanity (see Khan 2001), implying that the Caribbean is unexcep-
tional. He appreciates that a new generation of scholars seems to have eschewed
the gatekeeping concepts (Appadurai 1986) and embraced contemporary research
that could just as easily be carried out in a different place, as long as local histori-
cal and ethnographic specificities are kept in close view. Yet the value of the article
goes beyond the narrative. Throughout the genealogy, Palmié cites other scholars
(Trouillot, Thomas, Scott, Silverman) who have contributed to an understanding
of the topic at hand, thus founding a second line of descent.
Cédric Audebert’s essay, “Reconceptualizing the Haitian Migration System in
the Caribbean Basin,” is an ambitious and original attempt to rethink the dynamics
of a fluctuating Haitian migratory space analyzed not from a North-South perspec-
tive, but within a historically mutable and implicitly global Caribbean migratory
field. As Audebert rightly reminds us, Caribbean migrancy must be dated to the
immediate post-emancipation period, which tended to follow U.S. intervention-
ism and capital investment in parts of the region (such as the labor demands of the
Panama Canal projects, or the United Fruit Company). It really only oriented itself
towards the global North in the decades following formal decolonization, in the
British and Dutch case, and the 1965 Immigration legislation in the U.S. one. All
the while, however, inter-island mobility had not ceased at all, and has, in fact, only
increased due to progressively restrictive immigration policies in the global North
that, at one and the same time, led to the rise of far-flung undocumented migrant
diasporas. Taking Haiti as a paradigmatic case, Audebert (this issue) argues that
the longstanding “diasporization of Haitian society, which is as much the result of
asymmetrical relations with external powers as the product of the interweaving
of political, economic, social, and environmental forces specific to the society of
origin itself, has become a major structural dynamic of this society.”
Audebert discerns three distinct, but intertwined vectors structuring the
contemporary transnational Haitian migratory space: intra-regional streams,
extra-regional migrations to wealthy post-industrial societies, and flows to other

destinations (mainly South America) that have generated a political-economic
migrant imaginary comprising the “peyi blan” that is, the wealthy countries of
the North and the lòt peyi yo (the “other,” implicitly poorer destinations of the
Caribbean, South America, and now Mexico and Central America).
Taking his cues from French social geography and spatial system analysis,
Audebert thus critiques earlier (U.S.) anthropological transnationalism-studies
as one-dimensional and lacking in historical depth. His aim is to bring into
view the dynamics of diversification and complexity characterizing contemporary
Caribbean migration. As he puts it (this issue),
it is difficult to understand the functioning of the transnational network that relates

Haiti to Miami if one does not take into account the historical relation between
Northwestern Haiti and the Bahamas that preceded it. Likewise, how can one un-
derstand the transnational patterns of hometowns associations, diaspora politics
and families observed among Haitians in Paris if one simply focuses on the mere
relation with Haiti and overlooks the historical connection between the Haitian
presence in the French Caribbean and its subsequent expansion to metropolitan
France?
Audebert’s essay closes with an appropriate ethnographic illustration: the case of

the expansion of the traditional Haitian institution of the Madan Sara (interme-
diary market women) into the Caribbean region’s far-flung contemporary geo-
economy.
In “Marginados y postergados en la obra de Fernando Ortiz” (The Marginal-
ized and the Deferred in the Oeuvre of Fernando Ortiz), Cuba-based María del
Rosario Díaz discusses the work of Cuban lawyer, anthropologist, and ethnomusi-
cologist Fernando Ortiz through extensive research between 1984 and 2012 of his
personal papers in several archives in Cuba, France, Spain, and the United States.
Díaz proposes that Ortiz is a true pioneer of postcolonial and subaltern studies and,
even more so, of the anthropologies of the South. For sixty years, Ortiz contributed
to the understanding of the history and socio-cultural and historical processes that
created Cuba. He did so as a Cuban scholar who focused his attention on marginal-
ized groups such as those of indigenous, Chinese, and African origin. In her essay,
Diaz gives a detailed account of Ortiz’ early life on the island of Menorca (Spain).
This experience granted Ortiz a desire to understand cultures in their diversity.
After studying law at the University of Barcelona, Ortiz returned to Cuba in 1906
to study the social, cultural, and religious beliefs of the marginalized. As she states,
“his island of origin, like the Caribbean, became a ‘laboratory’ where for centuries
a new identity had been forged, an identity that needed to be studied in depth.” She
also addresses the genesis of one of Ortiz’ most influential concepts, transcultur-
ation, understood as a process that integrates and creates cultures “based on the
contrast between two defining Cuban economic and historic processes: tobacco

growing and manufacturing and the sugar industry” (Díaz, this issue). From then
on, she stresses, Ortiz’ oeuvre addressed processes of transculturation expressed at
different levels of completion in the Hispanic Caribbean. For example, she notes
how the concept of mulatez as revealed in the poetry of Nicolás Guillén or the
paintings of Wilfredo Lam epitomizes transculturation.
Díaz poignantly addresses how the concept of transculturation ran counter to
U.S anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits’ concept of acculturation, where one of
the cultures, the presumed “civilized” one was superior and could only be appropri-
ated by those who represented the “savage” or inferior one. This concept, according
to her, took hold in the United States, with the consequence that, even today, ev-
erything white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant is imposed on those cultures deemed
“savage” (such as indigenous peoples, African Americans, or Mexicans). Nonethe-
less, and in spite of these conflicts, Ortiz’ concept of transculturation and his polit-
ically committed academic work were well received worldwide. As Díaz reminds
the reader, they were used by UNESCO in its statements on race in 1950 and 1951,
and as the basis for the UN Declaration Against Racism. She concludes by propos-
ing that Fernando Ortiz paved the way for other scholars from the Global South
to study their own reality from the inside with “an autochthonous gaze, different
from other [gazes] not born or raised in those places,” while also emphasizing the
need for an applied and political anthropological practice in Cuba.
Kevin Yelvington’s article, “A Fourth Shift: Women Factory Workers Working
the Articulations of Caribbean Capitalism,” offers a careful analysis of the “occupa-
tional multiplicity” of strategies as well as the “moral economy of multiple and mul-
tiplex sets of social relations of reciprocity and responsibility” of Caribbean women
factory workers (Yelvington, this issue). This multiplicity goes in line with the his-
tory of Caribbean capitalism and its articulations with kinship systems, household
and family structures, and women’s many roles. Yelvington proposes that, in addi-
tion to the “triple shift” of women’s factory workers (wage labor, household labor,
and informal sector participation), women have the responsibility for a fourth shift:
cultivating and enhancing networks of support through “locations within global
circuits of labor supply and demand, state-led development strategies, and capital-
ist industrialization processes.” These networks involve social reproduction within
and outside the household, are deeply entangled with social and cultural networks,
and are located within social formations dominated by the capitalist mode of pro-
duction. The study of support networks has been a recurrent theme in Caribbean
anthropology since the 1970s.
Yelvington notes that a muscular informal sector in the Caribbean is nor-
mative rather than unusual. The informal sector subsidizes the formal sector by
reducing the cost of reproduction of workers’ labor through unpaid goods and
services. Yelvington highlights the example of rotating savings and credit associa-
tions (ROSCAs). These associations can be found across the Caribbean in different

manifestations in countries as diverse as Barbados, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Domini-
can Republic, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. He uses ethnographic research he
carried out at the household appliance multinational factory EUL, between 1986
and 1987, in Diego Martin (Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) as an illustration
of the role of these associations in working women’s lives. Yelvington explains how
the concepts of “network propinquity” and density are expressed in these support
networks, stressing how gender, age, ethnicity, class, and status diversify them.
Yelvington proposes that an analysis of women factory workers’ fourth shift
in the Caribbean can provide a powerful ethnographic reading of capitalism as
it manifests internationally and locally. This fourth shift “is not strictly wage la-
bor, not strictly household work/production/reproduction, and not strictly infor-
mal sector own-account petty commodity production, but the fourth shift over-
laps with, entails, and enables participation in those other shifts” (Yelvington,
this issue). Non-market labor forces are essential to understand formal capitalism;
they are also essential to understand anthropologically how labor is reproduced.
Yelvington concludes that the role of support networks in the informal economy
and the production-social reproduction contradiction intrinsic to capitalism begs
ethnographic analysis. Anthropologists are fit to contribute to the theoretical anal-
ysis of this contradiction and also to the construction of a more egalitarian world
through research-informed activism.
Bertin Louis and Daniel Joseph offer an examination of the global problem of
statelessness through an ethnographic analysis of what they term “antihaitianism”
(based on political scientist Ernesto Sagás’ concept of antihaitianismo) in the Do-
minican Republic, Haïti, and the Bahamas. In their article, “Statelessness among
People of Haitian Descent in the Caribbean,” the authors address the recurrent
treatment of Haitian immigrants as “repugnant cultural others” in countries as di-
verse as Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and the countries
where they conducted ethnographic fieldwork—the Dominican Republic, the Ba-
hamas, and Haïti itself. They identify a common pattern of antihaitianism in these
locations in spite of the racial composition and diverse local histories of these coun-
tries. They define antihaitianism as a regional and hemispheric phenomenon com-
posed of “ideologies, outcomes, policies, political strategies, and practices which
reify the negative connotations associated with Blackness and Haitian national-
ity.” Statelessness is but one consequence of this phenomenon. Both cases also
illustrate how peoples of African descent can create hierarchies that perpetuate
antiblackness.
Louis and Joseph employ their ethnographic research experiences to highlight
how statelessness is expressed differently throughout the Americas. Joseph’s
research (2016–17) takes the reader to Anse-à-Pitres, a small Haitian border town,
located in the southeast geographical department of Haiti where hundreds of
Dominicans of Haitian origin were displaced after the Dominican state stripped

them of their citizenship in a process known as la sentencia. In this case, Haitian
statelessness is demonstrated through expulsion and marginalization. Louis’
ethnographic research took place in New Providence in 2012 and 2018 among the
largest migrant group in the Bahamas, Haitians. Louis worked with the children
of Haitian migrants commonly called “Haitian-Bahamians.” These children
receive the nationality of their parents at birth, hence becoming stateless in front
of the law. Moreover, this practice exemplifies the construction of Haitians as
unassimilable within a Black country.
The cases detailed in this article illustrate vigorously how peoples of Haitian de-
scent have been rendered stateless non-citizens through various laws and decrees.
These acts perpetuate an “anti-Haitian pattern of marginalization and stigmati-
zation familiar throughout the Caribbean region and the Western hemisphere”
(Louis and Joseph, this issue). Statelessness becomes a form of structural violence
that effectively makes Haitians the scapegoat for all kinds of inequalities that result
from standard neoliberal practices in countries such as the Dominican Republic
and the Bahamas. Statelessness also becomes a form of social death characterized
by precarity and uncertainty that violates basic human rights and denies those who
endure it access to social, economic, cultural, and legal benefits.
Brent Crosson’s article, “Race, Nation, and Diaspora in the Southern
Caribbean: Unsettling the Ethnic Conflict Model,” presents a welcome empirical
correction to longstanding narratives about the ethnoreligious sources of politi-
cal conflict in Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. Based in part on the historical
fact that the British imported indentured South Asian labor to make up for the
loss of emancipated African labor power and later pitted both groups against each
other, this is a southern Caribbean version of M.G. Smith’s rather dyspeptic plu-
ral society model, itself extrapolated from the Dutch East Indies. This model has
not only come to pervade local folk sociologies but is propagated anew in politi-
cal rhetoric aiming to curb violent (narcotrafficking-related) crime. Smith, as we
know, saw state violence as one of the only binding moments and remained deeply
pessimistic about the future of independent Caribbean nation-states.
But perhaps, or so Crosson argues, no less than the “creole nationalism” that
gained ideological prominence in the early independence period —in Trinidad
and Tobago, until the 1970s Black Power revolt— this model was based on skewed
perspectives on interethnic and interreligious maneuvering on the part of “rural
cosmopolitans” that lead to what the author calls class-based “altered solidarities”
across seemingly unbridgeable sociopolitical divides.
There is much in Crosson’s essay that speaks for such a view. He moves from
mutual racist stereotyping, to spurious invocations of a “culture of violence” al-
legedly characterizing lower-class Black Trinidadians, to the colonial consolidation
of Hinduism and Christianity as supposed ethnoreligious blocs, and the fascinat-
ing political alignments of Black Orisha worshippers with the “Indian party” on

the basis of mutual disdain for Christian dominance. Crosson is able to marshal
ethnographic evidence for “rural cosmopolitanism and counter-histories of race”
tied to the decentralization of sugar and cocoa production in the second half of
the nineteenth century. This belies the stereotype of “occupational segregation”
between the supposed ethnoreligious blocs. From there, Crosson briefly goes into
oral histories of rampant multilingualism and finally settles on an ethnographic
case: the multi-ethnic clientele of spiritual workers or practitioners of obeah.
Here Crosson is clearly on ground that he knows well and presents a nuanced
picture of how Indo-Trinidadians flock to Black practitioners of obeah for help in
solving personal problems —not just because of their supposed magical prowess
(echoes of Tylor’s notion that the magic of the subaltern is always held in awe by
those who oppress them), but also because of a somewhat Simmelian principle that
one rather confides one’s problems to the alien stranger than to one’s own intimate
consociates. As Crosson argues —and we think he is right—what we see here are
echoes of a once much more pervasive, and perhaps only ideologically submerged,
“rural cosmopolitanism” that, while eschewing “syncretism” or “hybridity” thrived
on difference and complementarity as the royal road to trust and however distant
solidarity. Perhaps the “experiments with power,” as he put it in his book (Crosson
2020), that his obeah practicing interlocutors engage in can point us towards forms
of solidarity that evade the polarities between ethnoreligious “communalism” and
state-sponsored forms of (however spurious) creolization.
Changes in This Issue
As can be gleaned from the Table of Contents, this issue contains two different types
of contributions than previous issues. First, the incorporation of articles about
sound in the category of Ethnography In-Sight proceeds from JLACA’s commit-
ment to pioneering a more thoroughly conceived and practiced form of multime-
dia ethnographic research and reporting, which began with Volume 25. We were
interested in continuing the move to go beyond logocentric representations and
understandings as a part of the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of formally
incorporating the Caribbean into the Journal’s name. As such, we called for sub-
missions that meaningfully engage with the Caribbean through audio or visual
means to be accompanied by a written text.
Though a rigorous examination of visual systems did not begin until the late
twentieth century, much of early anthropological and ethnological scholarship
included drawings and photographs of people, places, and things. Franz Boas’
photographs of the Kwakwaka ‘wakw, Cushing’s drawing of the Zuñi, Flaherty’s
“Nanook,” Bateson and Mead’s Bali film show the importance of images in depict-
ing people’s lives. Yet this later shifted to include more participatory and reflexive

work, where who was framing the image was as informative and important as the
image itself (e.g., photovoice). Jean Rouch made great use of ethnographic film in
the mid–twentieth century, and since 1976, the Margaret Mead Festival has cele-
brated ethnographic films each year in New York.
Sound has regularly figured into social science scholarship for over 120 years.
Folklorists and anthropologists from the nineteenth century into the early twen-
tieth century recognized the importance of sound in ethnographic accounts, of-
ten including lyrics and even musical notations. Later, scholars like George Eaton
Simpson, Harold Courlander, Zora Neale Hurston, Melville Herskovits, and oth-
ers documented songs from the Caribbean. Alan Lomax documented countless
songs across the region, leading to dozens of recordings. In the twenty-first century,
sound studies revitalized interest in the auditory part of the human experience.
All three contributions concern the islands of Hispaniola.19 These articles, us-
ing a combination of images and audio, coincide well with both themes from this
issue as well as those treated in Caribbean-related publications of JLACA through-
out its fifteen years, namely: race, gender, state politics, knowledge production,
and migration. Ana María Belique, socióloga and co-founder of the Reconoci.do
movement, describes the cover photograph linked to the initiative Muñecas ne-
gras, which promotes the lives and value of Afrodescendents in the Dominican Re-
public. Darlène Dubuisson discusses how an audio recording of a poetry night in
Port-au-Prince allows us to visualize Haiti as part of a Caribbean and Latin Amer-
ican context. Kiran Jayaram shares an audio collage to argue for a politics of sound
through consideration of the choice of street cries versus silence as a survival strat-
egy for Haitian mobile vendors in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Second, this issue includes a new article format called Reflections. The idea for
it emerged after we finalized the themes and contributors for the Research Arti-
cles and saw major gaps in coverage that needed addressing. For example, despite
our best efforts, we were unable to secure contributions on or from Puerto Rico.20
At the same moment, we had thought about including an interview with the most
senior Caribbean(ist) anthropologist possible to expand upon issues in a singular
manner. Continuing in the attempt we began with the Research Articles to con-
tribute to the world anthropologies project (Lins Ribeiro and Escobar 2006, 1), in-
stead of having one person (historically a man from the United States) comment
at length about his version of the discipline and the region, we came up with the
concept for Reflections. Though these articles were written and conceived of inde-
pendently, they are to be read as a whole. As a result, just like looking in a mirror,
the Reflections will reveal something different to each person who reads them. In
other words, the concept for the section invokes both how the author understands
a topic and how the reader responds to the entirety of the section. It is dialogical.
We requested short responses from scholars around the world who could speak
to topics in Caribbean anthropology, not just their individual research. We asked

them to consider the limits of Caribbean anthropology (e.g., geographic, material,
ideological, linguistic, historical, or others), the most significant change seen in
Caribbean anthropology since beginning to work in the region, the most neglected
or the most overly-studied research direction in Caribbean anthropology, or the role
of a scholarly journal based in the United States in the production of anthropolog-
ical knowledge. It arguably goes against the premise of this article type for us to
summarize the contributions. However, we can disclose that at least one submis-
sion has engaged with each of the topics. As a group, we are happy with the manner
in which these writings intersect or diverge with one another as well as with this
Introduction and the Research Articles. Perhaps a subsequent JLACA issue may
have a collection of reflections on these Reflections.
Conclusion
The epigraph for this article begins with words by the anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa.
Of Tongan parents, born in Papua New Guinea, and schooled first in Fiji, his an-
thropological scholarly practice and teaching continue to inspire people working
in the Pacific Islands, or as he preferred the area to be called, Oceania. We invoke
his name for two reasons. First, he coined the concept of Oceania as a sea of is-
lands specifically to provide a model, ethnographically-sound and decolonial in
the past and present yet inspirational for the future, that counters the “economistic
and geographic deterministic view that overlooks culture history and the contem-
porary processes of what may be called world enlargement” (Hau’ofa 1993, 6). Put
another way, he felt it made more sense to see the water as what has connected and
could connect people on the islands rather than what kept them apart. This holds
true for the Caribbean, as seen in the peopling of the Americas (pre-1492), the
Columbian Exchange (1492 onward), the Middle Passages from Africa and South
and East Asia, the contemporary movement of people (refugees, migrants, tourists,
drug smugglers, military members, etc.) and that of commodities (legal and illegal)
across the sea. Second, after graduating with his Bachelor’s degree in History from
the University of New England (Australia), he traveled to Canada on scholarship
to study at McGill University. After three months, he switched from history and
sociology to anthropology, working with Dr. Frances Henry. Hau’ofa conducted
fieldwork in Trinidad and Tobago and wrote his dissertation on local connections
to national politics. Of further interest, his doctoral research was funded by the
Research Institute for the Study of Man, the social science organization in New
York, founded by Vera Rubin, that played a significant role in Caribbean anthro-
pological research in the mid to late twentieth century. Hau’ofa’s life demonstrates
his thought: people are (presently) and can be (future hope) connected by the sea.
So as a part of this voyage to understanding, when anthropologists from different

places working on one island state that the “Caribbean is” one way, and others do-
ing research in another land posit that the “Caribbean is” a different way, we ask
that you consider putting them all in the context of our Caribbean sea of (is)lands.
And so, the seventh bell, having long since rung, we bring this article to a close.
To our delight, we see red skies tonight.
Kiran Jayaram
Carla Guerrón Montero
Stephan Palmié
Karina Lissette Céspedes
Notes
1 A word here about our collaboration: none of us knew each other before embarking on this
journey, and we were, however benignly “barbadosed” (as the 17th century English would have it)
aboard what we increasingly came to see as a little ship that we would have to properly provision,
steer across high winds and out of occasional doldrums. In due course, nautical language crept into
our correspondence and conversations quite naturally, and not at all improperly: shipboard bonds
among fellow sufferers are strong, and—as Mintz and Price (1992) once argued apropos terms found
in many Afro-Atlantic vernaculars (“shipmate” in the Anglophone Caribbean, “carabela” in the Span-
ish Islands, “malungo” in Brazil, “sippi” and “mati” in Suriname)—often provided the grounds for ex-
traordinary social improvisations and cultural creativity. Soon Jayaram turned into captain (later el
almirante), Guerrón Montero and Palmié into first and second mates. Keeping with another Caribbean
tradition associated with the 17th century phrase “no peace beyond the line,” we began emulating pi-
rate talk in our correspondence. We did not discover it until just before the end of our collaboration,
and have not tried it out much, but the interested reader may want to turn to the Pirate Translator,
https://pirate.monkeyness.com/translate.
2 In addition to the heartfelt gratitude we extend to Quetzil Castañeda, we also give special thanks
to Eleana Velasco for her incredible support as Associate Editor, copyeditor, font of institutional mem-
ory, and wonderful colleague. After Castañeda stepped down as Editor-in-Chief, we received great sup-
port from Clare Sammells (SLACA), Elizabeth Marshall (KWGlobal), and Lia Zarganas and Preetirupa
Saikia (Wiley). Thanks also to the soon-to-be Editor-in-Chief, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, for listening
and providing helpful guidance.
3 Sancocho in the Dominican Republic (and elsewhere) is a stew of meat and root, distinct but
related to ajiaco in Cuba (and elsewhere), both which represent the national melting pot, or perhaps
salad bowl.
4 Naming was part and parcel of what Patricia Seed (1995) calls European “ceremonies of posses-
sion.” Some islands like Cuba, Jamaica, or several islands in the Bahamas (Bahama, Bimini, Abaco, etc.)
retained indigenous designations; others, like Haiti, regained it. But the Caribbean archipelago is oth-
erwise littered with names of Spanish or other European origin: Puerto Rico (Borikén), Guadeloupe
(Carucairi/Guacana), St. Lucia (Guanarao), Trinidad (Cairiani), etc. (cf. Sued Badillo 2003).
5 Hence both Shakespeare’s eponymous ultimate non-European other, Caliban, and Montaignes’
cannibals.
6 After Native American labor supply was exhausted, and Northern European powers began to
encroach upon Spain’s Caribbean domains, a phase of imported European indentured surplus labor was
quickly followed by large-scale importation of enslaved African labor mainly in agro-industrial sugar

production, followed, in importance, by coffee, tobacco, spices or tropical hardwood in mainland areas
such as British Honduras (Belize). With the end of the legal African slave trade in 1820 and the advent
of emancipation in the British empire in the 1830s, planters in the British Caribbean and Cuba began to
experiment with indentured Chinese and South Asian labor forces, thereby adding yet another ethnic
and cultural layer to the fundamental heterogeneity and hybridity of Caribbean plantation societies.
7 As Mintz (1996, 303) put in his 1994 Huxley Memorial Lecture (not without a good dose of sar-
casm), it was “as if global social processes needed centuries to ‘catch up’ in the world at large to what
Caribbean colonialism had done to its peoples, long ago. How entertaining, then, to think back to the
recent past, when Caribbean anthropology was considered theoretically unfruitful precisely because
its peoples supposedly lacked culture or were culturally bastardized. Horribile dictu, anthropology had
been caught napping, yet again.”
8 This is a point that Mintz (1977) had already made in his critique of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974):
what the latter called the Modern World-System was for Mintz ultimately a complexly articulated array
of emergent patterns of “local initiative and local response.”
9 The authors also recognize foundational work by renowned Oceanist scholar Epeli Hau’ofa (1968,
1975, 1993) and Figuerda et al. 2007.

10 We recognize how book reviews represent an unappreciated form of scholarly writing, as
pointed out in a 2019 Caribbean Studies Association panel honoring Constance Sutton’s contribution
to Caribbeanist anthropology.
11 More insightful still would be thematic comparison between JLAA/JLACA and substantive re-
views of Caribbean scholarship, like those mentioned above, but also by Boxill and McClean (2002)
and Carnegie (1992).
12 These islands and their peoples were not substantially treated throughout JLAA and JLACA, but
see brief mentions in 1(2), 6(2), 7(2), 12(1), and 16(2).

13 One import note is that despite some archaeology book reviews in the early years, both archae-
ology and biological anthropology are practically non-existent in JLACA.

14 Puerto Rico declared Spanish and English, and the United States does not have an official lan-
guage, though English is the de facto language for all official government documents.
15 See Scott (2018) on the astonishing rapidity with which new about the Haitian revolution was
spread (mainly by sailors) through the entire Atlantic basin.

16 For reasons of alignment with the Journal’s publication trends and for conceptual focus, we
elected not to invite archaeologists or biological anthropologists.

17 Given a new lease on life by Agamben’s resuscitation of that old fascist Carl Schmitt’s political
theology.
18 And one that, as the case of Greece in the second decade of the twentieth century demonstrated,
may not even hold much water anymore in parts of the heartland of political liberalism (see the con-
tributions to Knight and Stewart 2016).
19 We concur with Jayaram and Mayes’ position on the politics of using the name Hispaniola,
namely, that the name reflects “the island’s centrality in the development of capitalism and its contin-
ued subordination to external forces that maintain its continued colonial status” (2021, 227). Though
Hispaniola usually invokes two countries on one island, in fact, each nation-state claims sovereignty
over several smaller islands.
20 Outreach to several Puerto Rican scholars did not produce an agreement to contribute. Scholars
from Haiti and the Dominican Republic had agreed to contribute, but unfortunately, local conditions
made it impossible for them to submit their work to the issue.

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Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of

Anniversaries, if commemorated, can connect the past, present, and future.

186 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 187

Reconstructing some of the possible ideological templates informing the joint

188 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 189

190 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Caribbeanist Anthropology and The Global/Local Intersections

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 191

192 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

On the Journal’s Publishing Trends: A Content Analysis

Marking the fifteenth anniversary of the incorporation of “Caribbean” into this

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 193

194 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Table 2: Geographic Distribution of Caribbean Scholarship (1995–2021)

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 195

196 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 197

On the Research Articles in this Issue

198 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 199

To listen to Caribbean voices is to grapple with the necessarily historically and

200 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 201

202 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

it is difficult to understand the functioning of the transnational network that relates

Audebert’s essay closes with an appropriate ethnographic illustration: the case of

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 203

204 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 205

206 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Changes in This Issue

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 207

208 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 209

210 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

1975, 1993) and Figuerda et al. 2007.

see brief mentions in 1(2), 6(2), 7(2), 12(1), and 16(2).

ology and biological anthropology are practically non-existent in JLACA.

spread (mainly by sailors) through the entire Atlantic basin.

elected not to invite archaeologists or biological anthropologists.

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 211

212 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands 213

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