Pathology and Identity
The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad

A 1993 anthropological study of the Earth People, a new Caribbean religion led by Mother Earth.

Roland Littlewood (Author)

9780521384278, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 April 1993

352 pages, 12 b/w illus. 1 colour illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.69 kg

"...both original and truly significant. It represents a major contribution to the study of millenarian movements, to African-Caribbean Studies and, one would hope, to the writing of ethnography...Littlewood's text is neither book-bound nor prosaic. It is refreshingly erudite and beautifully written." Times Literary Supplement

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.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]