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This pioneering work is multi-disciplinary in approach as it examines the rich folk medicine of Jamaican. The authors analyse the historical and linguistic aspects of folk medicine, based on their research, extensive fieldwork and interviews. They explore the sociological and ethnological dimensions of common healing practices and Jamaica's biodiversity, in both flora and in fauna. As is the case with other aspects of Jamaican traditional culture, Jamaican folk medicine is largely misunderstood and subject to negative pejorative attitudes. This comprehensive study challenges some of the myths and misinformation. Particular attention is paid to cultural transference from Africa and the use of herbals in African-Jamaican religions. The comprehensive book is of academic value to teachers, students and researchers, and can also aid practitioners and policy makers in the field of health and healing. The work has an appendix and glossary as well as a detailed bibliography.

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Following the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, a concerted effort was made to replace enslaved labor with indentured Indian labor, and this book recounts the story of one woman's tragic experience in trying to immigrate to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. The book combines documentary evidence with a surrounding narrative interpretation in order to highlight the experiences of the young Indian woman, Maharani, who was allegedly raped and died subsequently on board the ship Allanshaw that sailed from Calcutta to colonial Guyana in 1885. The work sheds light on the general history of bonded labor migration as well as ""sexploitation."" Maharani's death gave rise to an extraordinary nine-day investigation involving some twenty-two witnesses, including some of the emigrants themselves. By making use of the emigrants' depositions, the book projects the voice of the indentured servants from India on their long voyage to the Caribbean. The events on this passage from India provide further evidence that 19th-century labor ""migration"" replicated several aspects of the middle passage of enslaved Africans, although it never reached slavery's brutal limits.

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From its first appearance in 1939 with a group of men knocking on pots and pans to the 1951 Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO), steelband has fascinated the world. Relying largely on oral histories, this work investigates and documents the different technical, musical and organisational steps by which the steelband movement was born and grew to maturity.

This study is a radical break with the approach to cultural creativity in general and music of the African diaspora in particular, emphasising the role of individual agency, microsociology and aesthetic values. This contrasts with the resistance school of thought, which views music as an automatic reaction to oppression rather than a deliberate attempt to satisfy aesthetic needs and impulses.

The minute biographical and psychological details provide a unique theory of creolisation and chart its relationship to African retentions, based on empirical data. This authoritative study will appeal to both the general reader interested in the origins of steelband and to scholars concerned with the creolisation of African and European cultures and Caribbean creativity.

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Shared Visions Contains fifty high-quality color reproductions of Caribbean art and sculpture housed at the three campuses of the University of the West Indies in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago. The book is a magnificent and rich celebration of heterogeneity, of unity in diversity, and of the creativity of Caribbean society, particularly in the visual arts. The book contains works by thirty-three Caribbean artists, including Edna Manley, Albert Huie, Gloria Escoffrey, Roger Mais, Rex Dixon, David Pottinger, and Barrington Watson.

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The bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004 triggered a renewed interest in Haitian history and culture. In many ways, however, much work is still required in this fertile field. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, the first collection of essays edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, addressed the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Haiti, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. This present volume develops and complements the previous collection to meet the growing demand for original scholarly work on Haiti. Widening the cultural lens to include diasporic studies, art, and questions of race and gender, Echoes of the Haitian Revolution exposes how the history of Haiti has shaped our ideas of race, nation and civilization in ways that we are often unaware of. Haiti's lessons continue to engage us in a dynamic dialog that compels us to question and revisit received arguments. The essays collected here provoke and stimulate these necessary conversations by approaching the legacies and repercussions of the revolution from a cultural perspective.

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Lady Nugent's husband was governor of Jamaica during a critical period of the Napoleonic Wars. Her personal diary conveys impressions of life among the slave-owning colonial gentry. The journal was first published in 1907.

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This book brings together contributions from a broad spectrum of authors on the most challenging issue for the Caribbean - against the dominating efforts of European colonizers and their descendants, the long-standing struggle of Caribbean people to fashion a culture and society that would give full space to the African heritage of the majority while accommodating their new and evolving circumstances. The book presents contemporary readings that contestation in the areas of Caribbean religion, education, language, music, race, sexual behavior in a time of the AIDS pandemic, and the economy. It grew out of a conference held in 2006 in honor of the scholarship of internationally acclaimed Professor Alston Barrington Chevannes, professor of social anthropology at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. This book is unique, therefore, in both the breadth of its focus and range of topics as well as the specific issues considered, most essays being useful case studies in particular fields. The geographical span includes Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, indeed the Caribbean as a whole. There is perhaps no other publication with such an aim, range and relevance. The theme of a Caribbean world view makes this book a pioneering contribution to Caribbean studies. The collection also contains an autobiographical essay by Professor Chevannes.