UC Irvine

This important book sheds light on the interplay of hierarchy and equality, the local and the global, and the Caribbean and the European in the cultural history of Nevis. In addition to bringing recent theoretical concerns with transnationalism and identity to Caribbean studies, Karen Olwig directs Caribbean ethnology away from static conceptions of kinship and household, religion and social life, and African cultural retentions, and toward an integration of kinship, gender, religion, and culture in terms of shifting notions of inequality in colonial and postcolonial societies. The result is a very significant argument about the embeddedness of European cultural forms in the Caribbean and their transformation by Caribbean peoples over four centuries.