Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
It can be claimed that the social and cultural anthropology of the Caribbean has been made peripheral to the core of the discipline. This is because of the ways anthropology became professionalized and the concomitant epistemological requirements to look for, and create if necessary, ‘pristine’ *cultures and *social structures. This situation is not a reflection of the Caribbean’s intrinsic anthropological value. Centuries of hegemonic *colonialism, *migration, *slavery and forced labour, miscegenation, and ‘derivative’ cultures broken off from their places of origin, all meant that anthropology defined the Caribbean as ‘hybrid’ and †‘creole’.
Thus, anthropology’s ‘othering’ enterprise—simultaneously providing a subject for, and ordering status within, the discipline (the more ‘other’ the better)—made the Caribbean anthropologlcally inferior to more ‘exotic’ ethnographic locales.
Yet, Caribbean anthropology has always involved issues that only became popular in the discipline as a whole in the 1980s and 1990s, including colonialism, *history and anthropology, diaspora processes, plantations, *gender, *ethnicity, the ‘crisis of representation’ characteristic of *postmodernism, local *world system connections, the links between fiction and anthropology-writing and the connections between ethnology and *nationalism, to name a few.
The notion of ‘contact’ determines the very anthropological definition of the Caribbean itself. ‘The Caribbean’ can be defined as the societies of the archipelago located in the Caribbean Sea proper, from Cuba south to Trinidad. In practice, it has also been defined to include the Bahamas islands and Bermuda to the north, Belize in *Central America, and Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana on the northeast shoulder of South America. A good case is also made to include within this designation the Caribbean diaspora communities created by a history of intra- and inter-regional migration, from Central America to North American and European cities such as Miami, Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, London, and Paris.
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