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

In the eastern Caribbean the expression "behind God's back" refers to a place that is remote or far away. In this book, the authors look at the changing face of village life in St. Lucy, Barbados' northern and most rural parish. What they find are people whose lives are fully connected to the outside world. One of the first things any visitor to the island notices are youths in baseball caps and T-shirts sporting the names and logos of American teams. Switching on the television, it is easier to find an American sitcom than a Caribbean program. In conversation, it soon becomes apparent that nearly every villager has a relative living overseas and that many have themselves traveled to New York, Toronto, and London. And all Barbadians are aware that the health of their economy depends on decisions made beyond their shores. The Parish Behind God's Back is informed by the authors' research and experiences directing an anthropology field school in Barbados since 1983. The book begins with an introduction to the island and parish, followed by history and macrolevel description of the island economy, before turning to the local scene--patterns of work, gender relations, lifecycle, community, and religion. The perspective then widens to look at the global forces that most directly affect local people's lives--television, tourism, and travel. An appendix describes how North American college students were changed by living in St. Lucy.

George Gmelch studied anthropology at Stanford as an undergraduate and at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a graduate student. He has done extensive research in Ireland, England, Alaska, and the Caribbean, and brief studies in Japan and Austria. He is currently studying the culture of professional baseball in the United States. The author of eight books and sixty articles, he is a professor of anthropology at Union College in upstate New York.

Sharon Bohn Gmelch obtained her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of five books. Her first, Tinkers and Travellers, won Ireland's Book of the Year award, and another, Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman, was a finalist for the Margaret Mead Award. She coproduced an ethnographic film on cultural revitalization among the Tlingit Indians of Southeast Alaska and is currently exploring the early use and impact of photography on the Tlingit. She is a professor of anthropology at Union College.