Karen Fog Olwig

Narratives of the children left behind: Home and identity in globalised Caribbean families

Abstract The long history of population movements in the Caribbean has led to the establishment of globalised families in which diffuse networks of relationships tie migrants and the relatives they leave behind into coherent social fields. Migration studies have documented that migrants often leave children behind with relatives, and that these children constitute pivotal points in the social fields. Yet there has been little focus on the children who grow up in these global family networks. This article examines four life stories related by young people from the Leeward Island of Nevis who were left behind by their migrant parents to live with their grandparents when they were small children. The aim of the analysis is to elucidate how children experience growing up in a home environment which is based on global relations as far as the most fundamental social, economic and emotional aspects of life are concerned. This study may also lead to a broader understanding of the cultural values associated with a...

Transnational socio-cultural systems and ethnographic research: Views from an extended field site

This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants’ attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation-states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants’ extra-local socio-cultural relations. Through an ethnographic study of dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, I explore the wide range of migration practices in which differing actors engage and the nature of the sociocultural systems that emerge as migrants move between places.

A wedding in the family: home making in a global kin network

Rituals such as weddings and funerals are significant for transnational family networks as events where scattered relatives meet and validate shared kinship and common origins. They are particularly important when taking place at a family ‘home’ that has been a centre of social and economic relations and locus of emotional attachment. This article analyses a wedding on a Caribbean island involving a large global family network, which occurred at a critical point in the family’s history. It became an occasion when members asserted their notions of belonging rooted in the ‘home’, not just as members of a common kin group, but as persons whose life trajectories had involved them in different social, economic and geographical contexts. Individually they had dissimilar interpretations and expectations of their place in the home, and these were played out at the wedding. The gathering allowed a display of family solidarity, but was also a site where differing views of individuals’ contribution to the global household were expressed, and rights to belong in the family home and, by implication, the island were contested.

Global culture, island identity : continuity and change in the Afro-Caribbean community of Nevis

Part 1 English Patriarchal hierarchy, African bondage: Africans in English patriarchy Afro-Caribbean culture, Euro-Caribbean institutions. Part 2 In pursuit of respectability: the Methodist society in a free society the struggle for recognition home is where you leave it - paradoxes of identity the demise of the local - the background for a global community the global community global culture, island identity.

Caribbean place identity: From family land to region and beyond

This paper argues that a useful point of departure for ethnographic research on the Caribbean can be found in the study of constructions of place and the wider patterns of rooted mobility, at various regional scales, which they implicate. This argument is developed through an examination of the emergence of family land on St. John, USVI, as an anchoring point for African‐Caribbean people engaged in acts of moving to explore social and economic opportunities outside the confines of local contexts of life. Family land thereby accommodated the seemingly contradictory acts of rooting and moving which have constituted mutually constitutive aspects of African‐Caribbean life. By examining the changing construction of family land as a locus of place identity it is possible to elucidate the establishment of significant frameworks of life among the people we study that are vital to the construction of place attachments ranging from the locus of family land and home island, to regional spheres which encompass not on...

Narrating deglobalization: Danish perceptions of a lost empire

According to Ulf Hannerz, globalization, viewed as a historic process of increasing interconnectedness, implies the possibility of an opposite process of deglobalization involving a delinking of interconnectedness. This study of Danish engagement in the Danish West Indies, a colony sold to the United States in 1917, exemplifies deglobalization. This case shows that while globalization can be reversed in terms of interconnectedness, it may continue unabated in stories of former global ventures. Indeed, the delinked Danish West Indian past has offered a rich, imagined resource for Danish narratives of past achievements on the global arena that bear little relation to the modest Danish contribution to colonial history. Globalization therefore does not just involve actual interconnectedness, but cultural interpretations of global engagement, past or present.

Mobility, education and life trajectories: new and old migratory pathways

Travel for educational purposes, once the privilege of the upper class, has become a global mass phenomenon in recent years. This special issue examines, within different cultural and historical contexts, the close relationship between migration, education and social mobility. Adopting the perspective that education includes a broad range of formative experiences, the articles explore different educational trajectories and the local, regional and transnational relations in which they are embedded. Three key issues emerge from the analyses: firstly, the central role of temporality in terms of both the overall historical conditions and the specific biographical circumstances shaping educational opportunities; secondly, the complex agendas informing individuals’ migration and the adjustment of these agendas in the light of the vagaries of migrant life; and thirdly, the importance of migrants’ self-perception as ‘educated persons’ and the invention of new, and the maintaining of old, identities that this involves.

Notions and practices of difference: an epilogue on the ethnography of diversity

The notion of diversity, which has gained increasing prominence in recent years, promises to rejuvenate migration research in terms of the theoretical and methodological lines of enquiry pursued, the empirical data generated and the interpretations and knowledge produced. By pointing to the existence of many possible forms of differentiation and belonging in social life, it offers a productive alternative to the ethnic framing that has characterised much migration research, whether large-scale quantitative surveys or small-scale ethnographic community studies. It, furthermore, can bring into sharper focus the significance of the temporal and spatial aspects of migration and related processes of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, it can stimulate the development of new, innovative research methods. There is still a need, however, to explore the complex nature of diversity as an empirical phenomenon and analytical concept. This is discussed with particular reference to mobility, contexts of sociality and the politics of academic concepts.

Islands as Places of Being and Belonging

Islands, traditionally important units of research and analysis in ethnographic research, have come to be viewed as a problematic unit of analysis, as anthropologists have realized the close integration of island societies within the wider world. This article argues that islands are still useful and fruitful foci of research, if their particular character is explored from an islandic point of view. Through life‐story interviews conducted in three large, dispersed families of Caribbean origin, the article demonstrates that islands may be usefully conceptualized as sociocultural constructs that constitute important anchoring points as well as sources of identification for migrants and their descendants.

Defining the national in the transnational: Cultural identity in the Afro‐Caribbean Diaspora

On the basis of a case study of the small Caribbean nation‐state of St. Kitts‐Nevis, this article discusses the problems of defining a national culture in a former colonial area. It is argued that African‐Caribbean culture emerged, to a great extent, in the margins of the colonial regime. During the last century and a half this margin has become extended to involve relations with emigrants who are dispersed over the globe. The cultural traditions which most clearly demarcate and unify the nationals in the new independent entity therefore are expressed and defined largely in a transnational context which cannot easily be called upon to support a national entity.