Pathology and Identity The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad [Hardcover]

A 1993 anthropological study of the Earth People, a new Caribbean religion led by Mother Earth.The Earth People draw on West African traditions and assert the particular power of female creativity. Their leader is Mother Earth, whose faith emerged following a cerebral disease. This 1993 account of a new West Indian religion examines how social patterns may emerge from radical personal experiences.The Earth People draw on West African traditions and assert the particular power of female creativity. Their leader is Mother Earth, whose faith emerged following a cerebral disease. This 1993 account of a new West Indian religion examines how social patterns may emerge from radical personal experiences.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.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. ...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 Supplemenlc.