1. Recitation #1: - Why Anthro. Why the Caribbean
Recitation #1: - Why Anthro? Why the Caribbean? - Caribbean Race Population - Sugar & Taste TextS: Trouillot’s “The Caribbean Region” Hoetink’s “Race and Color in the Caribbean” Cromwell’s “More than slaves”
Prof. L. Kaifa Roland
The Caribbean in
Post-Colonial Perspective
Anth 1115

2. (Trouillot; Day 2 Notes)
Why Anthropology?
(Trouillot; Day 2 Notes)
Objective
Understanding & Explaining Humankind
Describe, Analyze & Explain different cultures (past, present, geographically dispersed)
Kinds of anthro
- Physical/Biological
- Archaeological
- Linguistic
- Socio-cultural
Concerned with (sub/conscious) behaviors & actions
Interested in the question: How have groups adapted and given meaning to their lives?

3. What is Culture?
Shared beliefs/understandings/practices that are learned

4. Background to the Discipline
Origins in European discovery
Anthro and colonial legacy
Obsessed with being a Natural science?

5. Why post-colonial approach?
Considers legacy of colonial rule
Role in national/cultural identity

6. Why the Caribbean?
Problematic for essentialist & essentializing anthropology
Exemplifies globalization historically and today
Colonial histories
Creolization and local issues
Continuing issues of meanings of mobility

7. QUESTIONS/COMMENTS/DISCUSSION

8. What did Columbus “Discover”? (Hoetink/Cromwell; Day 3 Notes)
“Indians”
Ciboney
oldest
Taino-Arawak
most numerous
Carib (aka Kalinago)
most recent arrival
military threat
Path to Spn Domination
Acculturation/
Assimilation
Military technology
Disease

9. Gold on the Mainlands (Hoetink; Day 3 Notes)
Spanish attention to North and South America
Period of creole identity formation in Caribbean
Enter Holland, England, and France

10. Pirates and other the Caribbean “Others” (Cromwell; Day 3 Notes)
Soldiers
Smugglers/Pirates
Europe’s ethnic minorities
Jews
Irish
Scots
Free(d) people of color
Native Americans
Maroons (runaways)

11. Dutch West India Company
Mass importation of enslaved Africans
Shift to plantation slavery
Shift to chattel slavery
Underwater monument to lives lost to slavery off coast Grenada

12. Race under construction
Meanings assigned to skin color
Whites
Browns/Coloreds/Mulatos
Blacks/Slaves

13. QUESTIONS/COMMENTS/DISCUSSION

14. Gimme some Sugar!(Day 4 Notes)
Natural/Biological affinity for sweetness
Sweetness in nature
From Flavor to “Taste”

15. Sugar requires Labor

16. Supply and Demand (supply driven)
Pre-1650s low global supply
Dutch technology and growing slave labor
Small-scale spread to working class by mid-1700s

17. Shift to High Supply Europe and global colonization
Domestic market + colonial market

18. QUESTIONS/COMMENTS/DISCUSSION