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This analysis offers a historical, anthropological perspective on the development of
cultural identity in a global context. It does so through a case study of a West Indian
community which since the 1600s has incorporated African and European cultural
elements within a common framework of social life, in the process creating the basis for a
culturally all-encompassing and geographically unbounded “global” or inclusive culture.
This global culture has become extended to Western metropoles, as viable migrant
communities in North America and Britain have become established during the course of
this century, influencing the culture of the host societies. This discussion of global
cultural processes therefore offers a historical, anthropological analysis of a phenomenon
which has been associated with the “post-modern” times of the contemporary world.
The global quality of West Indian culture is seen to be related to the circumstances of
slavery and colonialism which sought to suppress and make invisible the Afro-Caribbean
community within the island society. For this reason the Afro-Caribbean people
employed colonial institutions, to which they gained access, as frameworks within which
to formalize and display a culture which they saw as their own. After emancipation these
frameworks increasingly derived from migration destinations in the West Indies, North
America and Britain, where waged employment was available. In the course of these
historical processes a global culture emerged which was characterized by its ability to
cultivate and promote a locally developed system of values and practices through the
appropriation of external cultural forms.
Research for this book began in 1978, when, during a fieldtrip on St. John in the
Virgin Islands, I interviewed a number of immigrant workers as part of a study on the
impact of American mass tourism on island society. Many of the migrants were from
Nevis, and upon completion of the research on tourism I began to study the system of
migration which had brought so many Nevisians to the island. Nevisian migration to St.
John turned out to be part of a larger pattern of transnational movement of people, goods
and remittances which I suspected might have wider implications. The way in which this
transnational movement sustained, and in turn was sustained by, a global community of
Nevisians living in different parts of the world suggested that the traditional place-centred
orientation of anthropology was inadequate. If even the smallest and most remote of
islands was so global in scope, this was a subject which seemed to warrant more
attention. During the 1980s fieldwork therefore was expanded to include not just the
home island of Nevis, but also migration destinations in Leeds, England, and New
Haven, USA. |
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