Customer Reviews

The Parish behind God's Back: The Changing Culture of Rural Barbados

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Excellent ethnography of the the changes that have been occurring in Barbados since the arrival of Europeans and Africans. The Gmelches take students to the island for a semester every other year so they can learn how to do ethnographic research in cultural anthropology. They are placed in Bajian homes and live there for ten weeks. The book is well informed by the students' perspectives. They help us all see what this island is like and what the life of the islanders has become in the light of tourism development on the island. The Gmelches write well and the book is easy to read and very informative. I have made the book a required text in one of my university, introductory anthropology courses.

The Gmelch's have, for many years, taken mostly white, middle-class, students from the USA to spend a college term living in rural St. Lucy Parish, Barbados. "The Parish Behind God's Back" presents a highly readable, appreciative, ethnographic account of contemporary village life gleaned from the Gmelch's own field work and that of their students. This book makes a very strong case for the value of study abroad schemes as it lets readers understand much about the process by which students gain insights into themselves and their own cultures while learning to live among strangers.

This book is an enjoyable read and highly informative. I have adopted it as a mandatory reading for my university course "Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean."

The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive ethnographic account of one rural community in the small island nation of Barbados. The intended audience is undergraduate students studying anthropology, therefore it is primarily descriptive, atheoretical, and written in a simple, straight-forward manner. The author begins with a historical overview, one theme being change over time. The second chapter, for example, discusses the demise of the sugar industry, the raison d'etre of the colony, and its recent replacement by tourism. The book very effectively personalizes life in the community by including portraits of individuals, particularly in chapter four. The next chapter is quite appropriately devoted to gender and the life cycle, the relationship between men and women being a key interest of scholars in the Caribbean in recent years. The remainder of the book (almost half) is devoted to a discussion of changes in the community, including the introduction of piped water and its effects, indoor plumbing, kerosene and later propane stoves, ovens, electricity, television, telephones,tourism, and emigration. The book is also effective in placing Barbados within the content of 'the world system'. I found it to be a very easy, pleasant and informative read, suitable for most any reader with an interest in anthropology, social change, globalization, ethnography, or, of course, Barbados and the English-speaking Caribbean. I assigned it for a class on the Caribbean and would use it again, although some students found it dull.

This book is terribly boring, and many of the characters have similar names, making it hard to keep track of people. I get that it's not actually a story, and is based on real life events and blahblahblah, but that doesn't make it any more interesting.