How has Pentecostalism, a decidedly American form of Christian revivalism, managed to achieve such phenomenal religious ascendancy in a former British colony among people of predominately African descent? According to Diane J. Austin-Broos, Pentecostalism has flourished because it successfully mediates between two historically central yet often oppositional themes in Jamaican religious life the characteristically African striving for personal freedom and happiness, and the Protestant struggle for atonement and salvation through rigorous ethical piety. With its emphasis on the individual...

Is a family system that permits freedom to enter, dissolve, and re-enter sexual unions, that tolerates high illegitimacy rates, and allows a large proportion of households to be headed by women, viable, natural and healthy? This is an appropriate question to ask of many modern industrial societies in the 1980s. Yet a system with just those factors has been in place in the West Indies for 150 years. In this book, Raymond T. Smith explores the extensive family and kinship ties of West Indians in Jamaica and Guyana, and in so doing dispels many of the myths that exist about West Indian family...

In this volume an international group of anthropologists and historians examines the complex relationships between family life, culture, and economic change in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dissatisfied with interpretations based on European experience, these scholars incorporate the particular histories, ideologies, and aspirations of New World peoples into analyses informed by general theory.

The study of kinship in Latin America has been in the past dominated by anthropologists concerned with primitive Indian groups. The few scholars who have investigated family life in urban...

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.