Anthropology

Cox's assertion that American race relations were rooted in capitalist class antagonisms and their colonial and imperialist pretensions went against many of the dominant theories about race relations in the United States at the time he began publishing, as well as those that became dominant leading into the early 1960s independence moments in the larger British West Indian territories. Originally published in 1948, Cox's Caste, Class, and Race is perhaps most appropriately positioned within what we might see as a deconstructionist impetus, best instantiated by C.L.R. James and Eric Williams; an impetus that would like the Americas within a common analytic frame. In positioning Cox alongside his better-known Caribbeanist colleagues, this paper nevertheless parses the American context in which his theoretical apparatus was being developedthe development in sociology of the "race relations" paradigm and the anthropological emphasis on racism and segregationin order to gain a more profound appreciation for the specificities of context in relation to transnational analyses of racial marginalization.

One of the agendas of Caribbean studies has been to create archives-or, more accurately, counterarchives-in order to make claims about the modern world and the significance of the region to the global processes that have shaped it over the past five centuries. 1 Scholars have been inspired by historical, literary, and ethnographic evidence to generate arguments about the region's centrality to the development of mercantile, and later industrial, capitalism; to a system of racialized labor management and contemporary class and cultural stratifications; to ideologies and practices linking gendered and racialized subjectivities to patterns of state formation and imperialism; to the development of "new" and creatively creolized social and expressive cultural practices; to revolutions and modern social movements; and to contemporary processes of transnationalism. If, as David Scott has argued, an "archive is not merely a collection; rather, it is a generative system . . . that governs the production and appearance of statements," then we must think about the process of developing archives as one that creates new possibilities, possibilities for seeing connections previously unexamined and for reordering our ontological taken-for-granteds. 2 Caribbean Studies, Archive Building, and the Problem of Violence 28 | Some have seen the process of archive creation as simultaneously a process of black memory making (memories, in this case, of things not directly experienced). Black memory, it is claimed, and more specifically New World black memory, constitutes something of a special case because it is produced and reproduced within a context often characterized by "an absence of ruins." This phrase, which is the title of Orlando Patterson's second novel, is meant to foreground experiences of rupture, pastlessness, and fragmentation-legacies of the transatlantic slave trade-that are often seen as constituting the historical and discursive context for the majority of New World African populations. Indeed, three generations of writers and literary critics have attempted, in different ways, to reconstruct the lives of those who were or would become slaves, to glean insight into their aspirations, their imaginations, and their day-to-day movements by putting together a mention in a diary here, a list in a log there. 3 These acts of reconstruction are oriented toward the creation of an historical consciousness, one that often stands in opposition to forms of state memory, and this is why they constitute a counterarchive, or what Anthony Bogues calls a "dread history." This is a history of radical utopian desire that "attempts to excavate from the practices and ideas of the subaltern resistance movements in the Caribbean a worldview in which hope is rooted in a conception of the bourgeois colonial world turned upside down." 4 Of course, the project of mining diverse spaces in order to generate this kind of historical consciousness not only counters dominant tropes about the region and the people who have inhabited it, it also potentially provides the basis for claims "about the relationship between present inequalities and past injustices." 5 As this is the structural-historical framework used by reparations activists, we might also profitably consider the impetus for archive creation in relation to projects of reparative justice.

There are two stories Haiti opens for political anthropology. The first has to do with the kinds of politics that have and have not been possible in the region, and the kinds of sovereignty that have and have not been recognized and valued. The second, related, story has had to do with the links between cultural alterity and nation-building or national identity. Both these stories, of course, are not bounded regionally, but reflect broader modernist imperatives. In this

In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior 'Gabu' Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, race, politics and what it means to be human from the space of the Afro-Caribbean allows a critical reorientation of modern ideologies of tem-porality that are inexorably linked to linear teleologies of progress, development, and improvement, and which therefore require the erasure of the forms of racial prior-ness that have been central to the making of the Caribbean as a material and ideological space.

In April 2019, Small Axe convened the symposium "The Jamaican 1950s" at the University of Pennsylvania. As with the two prior conferences-on the Jamaican 1960s and the Jamaican 1970s, convened in Miami and New York, respectively-the conference on the Jamaican 1950s was meant to contribute to our ongoing overall concern to rehistoricize the Jamaican cultural-political modern. Our aim in the series of symposia has been less about producing new substantive facts about these (or any) historical periods and more about inquiring into the frames of history through which we tell the stories of our pasts for our presents. Here, Jamaica has been mobilized as an "instance," one Caribbean geopolitical and historical terrain on which to carry out a methodological exercise. Our intention was not to reify Jamaica but to use it as the paradigmatic basis on which to reconsider the conceptual idioms appropriate to the demand of contemporary intervention. We were preoccupied, therefore, with a number of questions: How does our excavation of particular archives open new questions about Jamaica-and about the postcolonial Caribbean more generally-in particular moments? How do we question our received wisdoms, and what are the stakes of doing this? How does this help us reconceptualize the modern Caribbean?

Recently, there has been an upsurge in the critical attention directed toward the area studies research paradigms that were institutionalized after World War II. This upsurge comes at a time when anthropologists are also developing increasingly sophisticated accounts of the intersections of global and local processes. Yet there has been less engaged consideration of the agendas propelling global studies over area studies curricula. In this essay, we argue that an analysis of the Caribbean and Caribbeanist anthropology allows us to trace the global in the local, thus illustrating the benefits of local area analyses for understanding global dynamics. We draw on theoretical assertions regarding global-local interactions in order to assess the relation of anthropology to Caribbean studies and to explore the implications of analytical trajectories and theoretical developments within Caribbeanist anthropology for social and cultural processes on a global level.

Objectives: Racial disparities in health present a challenge to public health because of the complexity of interacting social forces. The Harlem Birth Right Project sought to improve understanding of these forces by using qualitative and community participatory methods. In this paper we 1) describe the process of qualitative inquiry and community involvement, 2) evaluate the impact of community participation, and 3) present a brief summary of the findings on social context as it relates to pregnancy outcomes of women in Harlem. Methods: We operationalized the qualitative method by combining participant observation, longitudinal case studies, and focus groups. An ethnographic survey was used to verify and triangulate findings across methods of data collection. We involved the community in the design, implementation, and analysis by collaborating with community-based organizations, setting up a community advisory board, and the use of dialogue groups and community meetings. Results: The use of qualitative methods and community partnership uncovered important aspects of the social context of women's lives that may not have emerged through traditional epidemiologic research. We found that pregnancy may serve as a catalyst to increase perception of the magnitude of preexisting social stressors. Several stressors and chronic strains associated with structural forces were identified. For example, the high percentage of households headed by women is seen as one consequence of larger structural forces. While social support networks serve as an important coping mechanism to buffer against the stress caused by these structural forces, the types of support women seek differs by social strata, and some strategies were identified as being substantially more effective than others. Conclusions: Qualitative and community participatory research can be successfully conducted to support public health goals and can derive important new information on the social context of women's lives.

Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the processes that many have come to label globalization. Although attempts within the social sciences have considered globalization processes in relation to articulations among ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, processes of racialization have only recently been taken up as central issues. In this article, we observe several new strategies of governance that emerged in the late twentieth century and onward and their implications for approaches to and understandings of race in the twenty-first century. These strategies have created new institutional spheres through which processes of racialization have proliferated, while still recalling earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value. We reflect on significant spatial and temporal moments in an attempt to reanimate the way that economic and political processes not only have been managed through ideas about race but also...

If the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization, and racial hierarchy, and if it has also been a space of conceptual mining, then it is worth asking about the status of the Caribbean (in anthropology) today. As anthropologists continue to reorient the field away from "coloniality" (Wynter 2003) and toward something like "radical humanism" (Jobson 2020), what might research in the Caribbean teach us? In this essay, I will focus on recent work on sovereignty emerging from ethnographic research in the region in order to argue that focusing on the ephemeral, the performative, and the affective charts sovereignty as something that is constantly in process, something that emerges through dialogue and practice. In doing so, contemporary ethnographies raise questions about the afterlives, and new lives, of imperialism and slavery, and about the potential for reparation and repair. [sovereignty, affect, afterlives of imperialism, coloniality, repair] R e s u m e n Si el Caribe fue (y sigue siendo) central en los procesos modernos de extracción, organización laboral y jerarquía racial, y si también ha sido un espacio de búsqueda conceptual, entonces vale la pena preguntarse sobre la situación del Caribe (en la antropología) hoy. A medida que los antropólogos continúan reorientando el campo lejos de la "colonialidad" (Wynter 2003) y hacia algo como el "humanismo radical" (Jobson 2020), ¿qué nos puede enseñar la investigación en el Caribe? En este ensayo, me enfoco en trabajos recientes sobre soberanía que emergen de la investigación etnográfica en la región, para argumentar que centrarse en lo efímero, lo performativo y lo afectivo traza la soberanía como algo en constante desarrollo, algo que emerge a través del diálogo y la práctica. Al hacerlo, las etnografías contemporáneas plantean preguntas sobre las vidas posteriores y las nuevas vidas, del imperialismo y la esclavitud, y sobre el potencial de reparación.

As a discipline, anthropology has long been subject to the scrutiny of critical race theorists and to questions of ethical practice with regard to ethnicity and representation. This dialogue features critical Black visual anthropologists discussing their approach to the discipline, and crucially asks, "What are the key lessons from 2020 in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests?" Each participant responds to photographs and film clips, offering provocations that challenge how we think about the discipline today. The dialogue is edited from a discussion that took place for the Royal Anthropology Institute Film Festival in 2021.