Pathology and Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad: 90 (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 90)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Revised ed., 8/21/2008
EAN 9780521026154, ISBN10: 0521026156
Paperback, 352 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
The first new religion in the Caribbean since Rastafari, the Earth People draw on West African sources, assert a renascent African identity, and celebrate female creativity. They argue that Black people are the guardians of a natural environment, which is constantly under threat from European science. In this 1993 book, Dr Littlewood, who is both a psychiatrist and a social anthropologist, criticizes received ideas about pathology and creativity. The founder's ideas emerged in her experience of cerebral disease, and Dr Littlewood shows how the Earth People reinterpret radical personal experiences to build a community. While naturalistic and personalistic interpretations of human life are both valid and necessary, neither can be reduced to the other.
Acknowledgements
1. The coming of the Earth People
2. A certain degree of instability
3. Madness, vice and Tabanka
popular knowledge of psychopathology in Trinidad
4. Mother Earth and the psychiatrists
5. Putting out the life
6. Your ancestor is you
African in a new world
7. Nature and the millennium
8. Incest
the naked earth
9. The beginning of the end
everyday life in the valley
10. Genesis of meanings, limits of mimesis
Appendices
Glossary
Notes
List of references
Index.