Caribbean Societies Research Articles

Breast Cancer in Young Women in Latin America: An Unmet, Growing Burden

Breast cancer (BC) is the leading cause of malignancy-related deaths among women aged ≤ 45 years. There are unexplored and uncertain issues for BC in this particular group in Latin America. The aim of this study is to evaluate BC incidence and mortality among young women and related clinicopathological and survivorship aspects in this region. Data were obtained from Globocan 2008 and the International Agency for Research on Cancer's Cancer Incidence in Five Continents series plus databases. We requested collaboration from the 12 different national cancer institutes in Latin America through SLACOM, the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Medical Oncology, and conducted a systematic literature review to obtain local data regarding the prevalence of BC among young women and their characteristics, outcomes, and survivorship-related issues. BC incidence and mortality proportions for Latin American women aged <44 years were higher when compared with those of developed countries (20% vs. 12% and 14% vs. 7%, respectively). We found only a few Latin American series addressing this topic, and prevalence varied between 8% and 14%. Stage II and III disease, high histological grade, and triple-negative and HER2 BC were features frequently observed among young Latin American BC patients. The rising incidence and mortality of BC in young Latin American women is a call to action in the region. It is necessary to monitor the epidemiological and clinical data through reliable cancer registries and to consider the implementation of protocols for education of patients and health professionals. This unmet, growing burden must be considered as a top priority of the national programs in the fight against BC, and models of specialized units should be implemented for this particular group of patients to provide better care for this emergent challenge.

Breast cancer in young women in Latin America: an unmet, growing burden.

Breast cancer (BC) is the leading cause of malignancy-related deaths among women aged ≤45 years. There are unexplored and uncertain issues for BC in this particular group in Latin America. The aim of this study is to evaluate BC incidence and mortality among young women and related clinicopathological and survivorship aspects in this region. Data were obtained from Globocan 2008 and the International Agency for Research on Cancer's Cancer Incidence in Five Continents series plus databases. We requested collaboration from the 12 different national cancer institutes in Latin America through SLACOM, the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Medical Oncology, and conducted a systematic literature review to obtain local data regarding the prevalence of BC among young women and their characteristics, outcomes, and survivorship-related issues. BC incidence and mortality proportions for Latin American women aged <44 years were higher when compared with those of developed countries (20% vs. 12% and 14% vs. 7%, respectively). We found only a few Latin American series addressing this topic, and prevalence varied between 8% and 14%. Stage II and III disease, high histological grade, and triple-negative and HER2 BC were features frequently observed among young Latin American BC patients. The rising incidence and mortality of BC in young Latin American women is a call to action in the region. It is necessary to monitor the epidemiological and clinical data through reliable cancer registries and to consider the implementation of protocols for education of patients and health professionals. This unmet, growing burden must be considered as a top priority of the national programs in the fight against BC, and models of specialized units should be implemented for this particular group of patients to provide better care for this emergent challenge.

Do Guyanese mothers' levels of warmth moderate the association between harshness and justness of physical punishment and preschoolers' prosocial behaviours and anger?

This study assessed the moderating role of Indo-Guyanese mothers' warmth and affection on the associations between harshness and justness of physical punishment and prosocial behaviours and anger in preschoolers. One hundred and thirty-nine rural Indo-Guyanese mothers filled out Rohner's Parental Acceptance-Rejection (PARQ) and Physical Punishment Questionnaires (PPQ). Teachers provided assessments of children's prosocial behaviours and anger in preschool settings. Maternal warmth did not moderate the relationship between harshness of physical punishment and children's prosocial behaviours and anger, but it did moderate the relationship between justness of physical punishment and prosocial behaviours for sons as well as the association between justness of physical punishment and anger for daughters. In Caribbean societies where harsh punishment is normative, maternal warmth may work more effectively with justness, and not with harshness of physical punishment, to lower negative childhood behavioural outcomes.

Obeah and Other Powers: The politics of Caribbean religion and healing ed. by Diana Paton, Maarit Forde (review)

Reviewed by: Obeah and Other Powers: The politics of Caribbean religion and healing ed. by Diana Paton, Maarit Forde Juanita De Barros Obeah and Other Powers: The politics of Caribbean religion and healing Edited by Diana Paton and Maarit Forde. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2012. In his chapter concluding Diana Paton’s and Maarit Forde’s important essay collection, Obeah and Other Powers: The politics of Caribbean religion and healing, Stephan Palmié points to the epistemological problems that obeah posed for contemporaries as well as for modern-day scholars. As a late eighteenth-century Barbadian source observed of obeah practitioners, “Of their arts, we know nothing” (316). Palmié argues that historians and ethnographers who aim to study obeah and similar ritual practices must deal with a “truly transcontinental palimpsest of inter-articulated occult modernities” (317). The source material is a “record of negativity,” and the practices and individuals they purport to describe draw from ideas rooted in diverse geographic and temporal locales; the very vocabulary employed is “hopelessly contaminated” (317). The contributors to this excellent collection, many of whom have previously produced significant studies of Caribbean history and society, do not shy away from the challenges described by Palmié. In essays addressing the island and mainland areas of the Caribbean as well as the Caribbean coast of Central America and ranging over several centuries, they explore the varied ways that obeah and other spiritual practices have been represented and used. In the process, they greatly advance our understanding of Caribbean history. The chapters in the collection explore the production and reproduction of these varied spiritual practices and their intersection with diverse “powers,” including those inspiring specialists as well as the political, economic and ideological powers that shaped the context in which they functioned. Some of these “powers” reflect larger world historical forces such as colonialism and slavery whereas others deal with more mundane concerns, including the construction and enforcement of laws governing their practice. But the “power” of Caribbean people themselves are also of interest to the contributors, as Diana Paton and Maarit Forde note in their fine introduction. As practitioners and consumers as well as adversaries of these practices, Caribbean men and women helped shape their representation. Indeed, Paton and Forde see their book as part of scholarly efforts to analyse religions in this part of the world “within historicized understandings of Caribbean societies” and to think about them less in terms of “origins” and more in terms of “issues of power” (11). The language used to represent these spiritual practices travelled widely and was, as John Savage observes in his contribution, highly “malleable.” Savage shows that in early nineteenth-century Martinique, for example, planters used the term obeah or “obi” to refer to the sorcery they blamed for a “wave of intensive poisoning activity” (164). That these French planters chose to employ this word, which is more commonly associated with the English-speaking Caribbean, indicates its utility. In her excellent chapter examining the enforcement of anti-obeah laws in early twentieth-century Jamaica, Diana Paton describes obeah as “a discursive construct.” Colonial elites used it as a “sign of Caribbean people’s position on the margins of ‘civilization’” (190). This was despite the role of non-elite Jamaicans in the enforcement of obeah (prompted by financial and other considerations) and their resulting contribution to “official and elite understandings” of it (173). The essays in this collection emphasize the significance of the mobility of Caribbean people in determining the ways in which obeah and other practices were used. It became a common language that could be used by individuals from various locales and ethnic and linguistic backgrounds in an effort to cope with daily hardships. As Lara Putnam shows in her excellent contribution to this volume, diversity was at the core of obeah which she sees as modern and innovative: “innovations and borrowing were the order of the day” (245). Another of the strengths of this collection is its inclusion of studies that reflect on more recent patterns, especially in the realm of art. Kenneth Bilby, for example, explores representation of obeah in popular music such as reggae and dancehall, and Katherine Smith examines the creation of...

Thinking with Others: Savage Thoughts about Anthropology and the West

This essay explores the significance of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s final work, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World . It posits that Trouillot’s argument contains three key claims. First, that anthropology is predicated on a problematic alterity, a way of thinking about otherness and difference constituted in relation to the universal unmarked category of the West. Second, that this relation between anthropology and alterity can be fully exposed only by tracing the historical emergence of the West through its imaginative and material relations with others—a history best seen from the experience of Caribbean societies and peoples. Third, that anthropology has the capacity to provide us with the necessary moral optimism to rethink the relation between plurality and universalism that grounds the human condition, but to do so we must first rescue the concepts of culture and difference from liberal identity politics.

Beyond Behavioral Adjustments: How Determinants of Contemporary Caribbean Masculinities Thwart Efforts to Eliminate Domestic Violence

This study and its ancillary behavioral health program identified and addressed a Caribbean cultural paradigm that is no longer viable in 21st century Caribbean society. A complex web of cultural and social determinants binds Caribbean men in a depressing scenario of limited educational opportunity, inconsistent seasonal employment, and proclivity toward violence against women. Our study chronicles a Caribbean domestic violence initiative, Partnership for Peace (PFP), with qualitative data from 32 Grenadian male domestic violence offenders and nine of their female counterparts. We found that Caribbean-gendered relations are intrinsically linked, and any attempt to foster behavioral adjustments among male perpetrators will not be sustainable without addressing gendered disparities in education and employment.

‘These Things not Marked on Paper’: Creolisation, Affect and Tomboyism in Joan Anim-addo's Janie, Cricketing Lady and Margaret Cezair-thompson's The Pirate's Daughter

This article will look closely at the performance of tomboy identity in Joan Anim-Addo's collection of poetry Janie, Cricketing Lady, written as a tribute to her mother Jane Joseph, and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The Pirate's Daughter, a fiction about Errol Flynn's ‘outside’ Jamaican daughter, May. It will argue that the ongoing affects of colonialism and patriarchy in the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, respectively, shape the life narratives of Janie and May who express their anger, shame, fear, frustration and desire through their ambiguous gender identity and through their determination to intervene in masculinist traditions, such as cricket, piracy and adventure, traditions that underpin Caribbean his/tories. To understand the way in which affect can be expressed through tomboyism in Caribbean societies, it is necessary to look at colour and class alongside gender in the context of Caribbean creolisation.

Independent documentary filmmaking in Jamaica: an interview with Esther Figueroa

Esther Figueroa, PhD, is an independent Jamaican filmmaker with over twenty-five years of experience in political documentary cinema. A self-taught activist filmmaker, her work focuses on local knowledge, Indigenous cultures, social injustice, community empowerment and, most recently, environmental issues. Her poignant documentaries give voice to those outside of mainstream media and aim to counter dominant narratives and practices that are driven by commercial and political interests. This interview, which took place via Skype on 20 September 2010, concentrates on Figueroa's documentary work in Jamaica, particularly her latest feature-length documentary Jamaica for Sale (2009/2010), and discusses her filmmaking career in the context of Caribbean cinema and society.

Sociodemographic Structures and Processes Predispose Caribbean Populations to Risk and Social Vulnerability

In order to understand the population dynamics and the accompanying socio-demographic variables’ trends, risks, and social vulnerability, one must have an understanding of the history and contemporary nature of the political economy of the region. The colonization of the Caribbean depended on the exploitation of suitable and abundant workforce to man the plantations which supplied the raw material manufactured from the lucrative mono-crop (sugar cane). Exploitation refers to the appropriation of the surplus of production over and above what the producers needed to reproduce and re-energize their bodies, so as to sustain their lives and the labour process. The traditional social system was emasculated with inequities which impacted mostly on the rapidly increasing population. The movement for independence sought political power so as to use the State as the lever to redress the inequities and to promote the social and economic development of the region. The assumption was that economic development would improve the material conditions of life for the majority of the people, mainly African and East Indians, thereby provide the basis for the social development of the societies of the region. The study has identified the impact the “brain drain” is having in some areas of economic development and at the same time, the important role Caribbean governments have to play in the formulation of education policies that will benefit the most vulnerable groups in Caribbean societies so that they can be able to improve their social and psychological living standards.

Sociodemographic Structures and Processes Predispose Caribbean Populations to Risk and Social Vulnerability

In order to understand the population dynamics and the accompanying socio-demographic variables’ trends, risks, and social vulnerability, one must have an understanding of the history and contemporary nature of the political economy of the region. The colonization of the Caribbean depended on the exploitation of suitable and abundant workforce to man the plantations which supplied the raw material manufactured from the lucrative mono-crop (sugar cane). Exploitation refers to the appropriation of the surplus of production over and above what the producers needed to reproduce and re-energize their bodies, so as to sustain their lives and the labour process. The traditional social system was emasculated with inequities which impacted mostly on the rapidly increasing population. The movement for independence sought political power so as to use the State as the lever to redress the inequities and to promote the social and economic development of the region. The assumption was that economic development would improve the material conditions of life for the majority of the people, mainly African and East Indians, thereby provide the basis for the social development of the societies of the region. The study has identified the impact the “brain drain” is having in some areas of economic development and at the same time, the important role Caribbean governments have to play in the formulation of education policies that will benefit the most vulnerable groups in Caribbean societies so that they can be able to improve their social and psychological living standards.

Contending with Literalism and Dogma: Caribbean Theology in the Public Sphere

AbstractThis article argues that a liberating Caribbean theology must position itself to provide guidance and direction to the people of the Caribbean as an urgent task by contending, in the public sphere, with the literalism and dogma inherent in Christian fundamentalist theology. By engaging Christian fundamentalism at the level of ideology, Caribbean theology can offer an alternative consciousness through which Caribbean societies can be reshaped in the interest of the social well-being of the peoples of the region.

Variations in Health, Illness and Health Care-Seeking Behaviour of Those in the Upper Social Hierarchies in a Caribbean Society

Background: Little research exists in the Caribbean, and in particular Jamaica, on the upper class, and no study emerged from a search of the literature examining health, illness, and health care-seeking behaviour of this group. Aims: To provide pertinent information on the upper class in regards to their general health status, illnesses, typology of illnesses, health care seeking behaviours and factors which determine their (1) moderate-to-very good health status, (2) illness, and (3) health care seeking behaviour in order to make available to policy specialists and public health practitioners information on this group, to be used as a guide in their decision making policies. Methods and materials: A sample of 2,734 respondents from the wealthiest 20% and second wealthy social hierarchies was extracted from a cross-sectional survey of 6,783 respondents. An administered questionnaire was used to collect the data, which were stored and analyzed using SPSS for Windows 16.0 (SPSS Inc; Chicago, IL, USA). The questionnaire was modelled on the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) household survey. Results: The majority of the sample stated at least good health status (83.3%), with 0.5% indicating very poor health status, and 15.3% who indicated an illness in the last 4-week period. Four variables emerged as statistically correlated with moderate-to-very good health status of those in the upper class (i.e. second wealthy and wealthiest 20%) - Model fit χ2 = 57.54, P < 0.0001. The model explained 33.2% of the variance in moderate-to-very good health status, and that the model is a good fit for the data. Three variables emerged as statistically correlated with self-reported illness - Model fit χ2 = 1087.7, P < 0.0001. The significant variables (i.e. health care-seeking behaviour, good health status, and marital status) accounted for 72.4% of the variability in self-reported illness. Three variables emerged as statistically significant correlates of health care-seekers - Model fit χ2 = 995.45, P < 0.0001. The statistically significant correlates (i.e. good health status, self-reported illness, marital status) accounted for 76.4% of the variance in health care-seeking behaviour of the upper class. Conclusion: Rural residents continue to have lower moderate-to-very good health status when compared to the general population, and the second wealthy and the wealthiest 20% in Jamaica. Although only 4 percent of the upper social hierarchy utilize the public health care system, there is still a demand for public health services for this group, and it must be taken into account as a part of the general planning for the health care system of the country.

Sex Feel Good: Enjoyment of Sexual Intercourse by Some Barbadian Teenagers

Within Caribbean societies and Barbados in particular issues on human sexuality are approached from a pathological, controlling, and judgmental perspective. These views resist an acknowledgment that children are sexual beings which manifestations are more evident during the teen years. Despite societal resistance, teenage pregnancies and sexual abuse forced societies to deal even if reluctantly with teenage sexuality. Based on Caribbean conservative approach to matters around sexuality it comes as no surprise that concerns around teenage sexuality is concentrated within discussions, discourses and scholarship about reproductive health, sexual abuse and sexually transmitted diseases. Based on the literature researched for Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean teenage sexual desire, and pleasurable sexual intercourses are virtually none-existent. It is the intention with this paper to contribute to scholarship on teenage sexual pleasure within Barbadian society. For its analysis the paper will utilize data collected from a teen sexuality research done during 2011-2012 among two secondary schools in Barbados. The main objective is to demonstrate that Barbadian teenagers are involved and enjoying sexual intercourse and other sexually related activities despite hegemonic discourses of sexual repression and control.

Presencia histórica y cultural de África en Cartagena de Indias y su entorno

From the beginning of the Conquest in the 16th century until the consolidation of Columbian Independence (19th century) and the subsequent freeing of African slaves in Cartagena de Indias and its environs, key moments shaped the attitudes and adjustments of those forced immigrants. The drum became once again an important instrument of a musical tradition — an instrument of communication and pleasure, used both to announce death and to invite enjoyment of life in bunde (a local musical genre) and, perhaps, to encourage the seeking of freedom. A brotherhood of slaves was established in councils with music and dance, generating a sense of identity and belonging to the nations from which they came, creating the Afro-Columbian cultural imprint. During the era of Independence and founding of the Republic, the cultural heritage of this ancestral sub-Saharan current from Cartagena was mixed and integrated into the roots of the indigenous Indo-Americans and Spaniards, giving material and spiritual form to the people of the today's Columbian Caribbean society.

On Naipaul's Cultural Positions in The Middle Passage

In his article "On Naipaul's Cultural Positions in The Middle Passage" Shizen Ozawa discusses V.S. Naipaul's first travel writing. An account of his "returning" journey to the five Caribbean "colonial societies," The Middle Passage constitutes a major turning point in Naipaul's long literary career. Whereas his earlier novels depict his homeland of Trinidad ironically, although with a certain warmth and sympathy, from The Middle Passage on the world depicted both in his fictions and non-fictions turns bleaker. Correspondingly, his authorial persona changes from that of a West Indian writer to a controversial chronicler of chaotic postcolonial conditions. Ozawa analyses how Naipaul positions himself in relation to the Caribbean societies he describes and demonstrates that Naipaul characterizes himself strategically as a cultural insider in some passages and as an outsider in others. Naipaul's frequent references to Victorian metropolitan travelers are also discussed in terms of the writer's cultural affiliations.

Mobility and Language in the Early ModernAntilles

This article analyses a corpus of texts, principally of ecclesiastical authorship, which depict early- to mid-seventeenth-century attempts to colonise the Antilles and coastal South America. Focus is placed on French representations of Amerindian populations and of plantation and indigenous economies at a time of great political and military upheaval in the Caribbean. An initial analysis of depictions of European colonial initiatives explores their significant impact on Caribbean societies and suggests how the resultant conflicts influenced representations of Amerindian peoples. This is followed by analysis of the contrasting depictions of European and indigenous economic systems. European populations are depicted as mobile, laborious, and surplus-producing whereas indigenous populations are mainly characterised by economic stasis and the subsistence economy. A further analysis of depictions of Amerindian languages suggests how these might reflect the perception by French observers of absence at the heart of indigenous societies. Rather than indicating an innate deficiency in the faculty of language, this may be interpreted as mirroring a perceived incompleteness in the religious, economic or textual domains.

The Care Chain, Children's Mobility and the Caribbean Migration Tradition

Children's mobility is analysed in this article as an important foundation of the migration tradition that has been an integral aspect of most Caribbean societies. I show that, because of their position as dependents who are not yet fully socialised and who are subject to adult authority, children move, and are moved, relatively easily between varying social domains and households in different locations. This migration has created a Caribbean ‘care chain’ that has played an important role in the generating and reinforcing of local, regional and transnational networks of interpersonal relations. This leads to the suggestion that young adults' migration for domestic work—which often builds on informal inter-personal social relations and offers the only means of migration for the many women who do not have access to more attractive forms of wage-labour migration—can be viewed as an extension and transformation of child migration. The analysis is based on fieldwork with people from the Leeward Island of Nevis, and in particular on life-story interviews with those who, as children and young adults, have been engaged in physical mobility.

Climate Change and the Caribbean: Review and Response

Les économies des pays caribéens, les modes de vie, les activités, les pratiques et les cycles opérationnels sont intimement liés au climat, à cause de la vulnérabilité de ces sociétés face aux changements climatiques et/ou aux variations de ces deniers. Les extrêmes climatiques affectent l’agriculture, la pêche, la santé, le tourisme, l’approvisionnement en eau, la consommation d’énergie, pour ne citer que quelques exemples. Cependant, peu d’importance est accordé au climat dans les plans de développement à long terme, ni dans le développement des politiques publiques de la région. Ceci est dû en partie à un manque de connaissance sur le changement climatique, sa probable manifestation dans la région et son possible impact dans les sociétés caribéennes. Cet article présente une vue d’ensemble de la croissante banque de connaissances sur la science du climat caribéen ; ses changements et ses variabilités. On propose une brève description des éléments fondamentaux de la science qui étudie le changement climatique, les tendances passées et les projections futures pour le climat dans la Caraïbe, ainsi que les menaces que représentent les changements climatiques, tout en considérant que tenant compte la science climatique caribéenne dispose suffisamment de données récentes. En outre, on présente un aperçu général de la façon dont le problème climatique pourrait être abordé.

Modernity, Empowerment and Grassroots Communication in the English-speaking Caribbean

IntroductionDEVELOPMENT IS, IN ESSENCE, ABOUT the betterment of humanity. Yet, there are many examples of so-called development activities in which the people have never really been considered except as 'receivers' of development. That approach has long been acknowledged to be inappropriate not just for the Caribbean, but right across the developing world - there are glaring examples in places such as Haiti, Jamaica, Southeast Asia, and on the African continent, with the end result yielding nothing but a project report sitting on a shelf in a developed country.Recent discussions about development are, however, challenging people's understanding of the world in which they are surviving and by extension how they define that world. New ways of doing things have to be found to deal with the challenges of contemporary approaches to modernity. The political projects for democracy cannot survive alone; neither can the projects for economic growth without considering the overall well-being of humanity.In acknowledging the centrality of communication to human survival, one sure way of improving the quality of life involves initiating communication strategies that advance the notion of development as empowering and transformative process. Placing communication at the centre of the development process is not only prudent, but demands a major paradigm shift, from the traditional external-innovator/innovation and source-biased one-way information flow to one which considers three basic principles:1. people's culture, knowledge and sense of identity are critical factors in the development process;2. the use of technology must be determined by its appropriateness to the culture, context and environment in which and for which it is being applied; and3. people's participation at the highest level of decision-taking is of primary value, from design, to implementation and management, to evaluation.It is in considering these three basic principles that we begin to place a qualitatively higher value on communication, both as process and product of development, and by extension on the consolidation of new ways of thinking, especially regarding the empowerment of the grassroots in the development process.The Cornell Empowerment Group defines empowerment as an intentional, ongoing process centred in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring and group participation, through which people lacking equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources.1 This process runs counter to the modernisation perspective on development. Modernisation has been the main framework within which the Caribbean region has been struggling to survive ever since the Eurocentric project of economic, cultural, and technological modernity emerged over five hundred years ago. That project, for most of the so-called Third World, has been both unnatural and a failed process.In a natural evolution of functional human societies, social dynamism, environmental harmony, cultural plurality, and diversity in survival strategies should have been the heritage of the Caribbean region. Had it not been for what Glenn Sankatsing2 calls a derailment of the internal, indigenous ingenuity of the various peoples of the Caribbean, by those who appropriated developmental goals unto themselves, certainly the historiography of the region would have been otherwise. Rather, what has evolved is a Caribbean society which for the most part is stymied by economic stagflation, prolonged social crises, cultural conflicts around hegemony, unjustifiable environmental degradation, sustained devaluation of the human resource, and a perpetual struggle by the peoples of the region to find their own social, economic, cultural and intellectual identity, place and voice.Admittedly, the failure of the modernity project has also brought with it several versions of empowerment projects all aimed at providing the economically poor, culturally vulnerable and socially marginalised opportunity to explore ways and means of taking control over their own resources. …

The Ship, the Plantation, and the Polis:

The Ship, the Plantation, and the <i>Polis</i>: