Pathology and Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad

by Roland Littlewood

Overview

The Earth People of Trinidad draw on Yoruba sources to assert the particular power of female creativity. This first new Caribbean religion since Rastafari is led by a woman, Mother Earth, whose ideas emerged from her experience of a cerebral disease. The author, Roland Littlewood, who is both a psychiatrist and a social anthropologist, offers a nonreductionist view on the relationship between pathology and creativity, between the natural and the human sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521384278
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/29/1993
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology , #90
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.94(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"...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

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