Karen Fog Olwig 1999 Identities Global Studies in Culture An Power

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Caribbean place identity: From family land to region

and beyond
a
Karen Fog Olwig
a
Institute of Anthropology , University of Copenhagen , Frederiksholms Kanal 4, Copenhagen
k, DK‐120
Published online: 04 May 2010.
To cite this article: Karen Fog Olwig (1999) Caribbean place identity: From family land to region and beyond, Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power, 5:4, 435-467, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.1999.9962626
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.1999.9962626
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Caribbean Place Identity: From Family
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Land to Region and Beyond
Karen Fog Olwig
This paper argues that a useful point of departure for ethnographic

research on the Caribbean can be found in the study of constructions
of place and the wider patterns of rooted mobility, at various
regional scales, which they implicate. This argument is developed
through an examination of the emergence of family land on St. John,
USVI, as an anchoring point for African-Caribbean people engaged
in acts of moving to explore social and economic opportunities out-
side the confines of local contexts of life. Family land thereby accom-
modated the seemingly contradictory acts of rooting and moving
which have constituted mutually constitutive aspects of African-
Caribbean life. By examining the changing construction of family
land as a locus of place identity it is possible to elucidate the estab-
lishment of significant frameworks of life among the people we
study that are vital to the construction of place attachments ranging
from the locus of family land and home island, to regional spheres
which encompass not only the Caribbean basin, but global networks
of relations.
Key Words: African-Caribbean culture. The Caribbean region, Family land,

The cultural construction of place, Cultural identity
The growing awareness of the social, economic, and cultural con-

nectivity which is characteristic of the modern world raises ques-
tions about the usefulness of conceptualizing this world in terms
of different localized cultures grouped in distinct ethnographic
regions. Such questions are particularly relevant when studying the
Identities, Vol. 5(4), pp. 435-467 © 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V.
Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under
Photocopying permitted by license only the Gordon and Breach Publishers imprint
Printed in Malaysia.
435
436 Karen Fog Olwig
Caribbean because of its close integration within the modern world
economy; its extensive involvement with massive population
movements on a global scale, and its integral articulation into non-
local social and economic fields of relations extending well beyond
the area. This new emphasis on mobility and interconnections does
not mean, however, that notions of region, place, or nation, more

generally, have lost their significance. As argued by Sutton, in a dis-
cussion on transnational migration (Sutton 1992: 242), if "trans-
nationalized fields of socio-cultural action" linked to "transnational
economies" constitute a basic framework of life, place conceptions
and practices by localized people becomes an important topic of
study.
The increasing attention to movement and interconnections rep-
resented in the work of scholars like Sutton makes clear that places
do not exist in and of themselves, ready to be discovered and put
on the ethnographic map by anthropologists, or to be evoked as
sources of identification by the people they study. Places are cul-
tural and social constructions and the various ways in which they
are constructed have important implications that are useful in
ethnographic and regional studies. I shall here suggest that a good
point of departure for research on the Caribbean region can be
found in the study of Caribbean constructions of place and the
wider patterns of rooted mobility which they implicate. I shall do
this here through a case study of "family land," a form of common
land tenure which became an important locus of African-Caribbean
culture in the post-Emancipation period. This development
reflected the building by the freed population of mobile fields of
relationships extending beyond local communities, yet grounded in
concrete localities. This study leads me to contribute to the current
efforts to discard the concept of the region as a reified cultural area,
and to suggest that anthropologists are developing a more proces-
sual notion of regions as cultural constructions shaped both by
anthropologists and the people they study. In the case of the
Caribbean, it is particularly important to remember that the area
was created in a long process of social, economic, and cultural inter-
relationships involving people of diverse ethnic backgrounds who
entered the area in different historical contexts and with quite dis-
parate social and economic status. It is therefore not possible to
delineate one notion of the Caribbean region. Rather, varying con-
structions of place and identity have emerged through time leading
to somewhat different conceptualizations of the region.1 This paper
Caribbean Place Identity 437
focuses on one particular instance of place, which has become iden-
tified as African-Caribbean, because it developed among the freed
slaves of African background. Similar cultural constructions of
place, linking home, land, and roots symbolically, have emerged,
for example, among small farmers of Indo-Caribbean or Spanish-
Caribbean background and provided important loci of belonging

for migrants (Lauria personal communication.)
In this essay I shall first briefly discuss how anthropologists have
sought to create an ethnographic region, or cultural area, which
might demarcate a field of comparative empirical research and
comparative analysis, on par with other ethnographic regions in
ethnographic research. I argue that the scholarly construction of the
Caribbean actually contains two dichotomous perspectives. On the
one hand, a "local" approach has focused almost exclusively on the
Caribbean as a historical construction within the geographical area
of the Caribbean basin. In contrast, a "trans-local" approach has
emphasized the importance of physical movement and social fields
of relations as relevant frameworks of Caribbean life. In this second
perspective, local areas are primarily vantage points of interaction
within a more globally oriented pattern of life. Next I shall turn
towards a more detailed examination of family land through a
study of family land on St. John in the US Virgin Islands, formerly
Danish West Indies. I shall argue that family land became particu-
larly important, in the period from the late nineteenth to the
first half of the twentieth century, because it was able to accommo-
date the potentiality of engaging in global relations and identifying
with local places. Hence, family land enables persons to be mobile,
while maintaining a sense of rootedness. This analysis is not
intended to give a full treatment of the complex issue of family
land in the Caribbean, but rather to offer an instantiation of a kind
of place which allowed for a form of rooted mobility. This form of
mobility integrated African-Caribbean people into larger, regional
frameworks of life and.led, in some cases, to the development
of a regional or, even, a globalized consciousness, that spanned
diverse scales of identity from a patch of poor rural land in the
Caribbean to an active social engagement in a world metropolis.
Through this case study of family land on St. John it may therefore
be possible to develop an anthropological concept of the Caribbean
region which is attuned to the global spheres of action and
local points of identification that are of importance to Caribbean
people.
438 Karen Fog Olwig
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE
Around 1970 the American Museum of Natural History pub-

lished a series of readers on various ethnographic regions of the
world. The third volume published, after Peoples and Cultures of
the Pacific, and People and Cultures of the Middle East, was Peoples
and Cultures of the Caribbean. In an introductory essay to the reader,
the editor Michael Horowitz introduced the Caribbean as some-
what of a curiosity, quite different from the usual areas where
"traditional ethnological inquiry" had been undertaken (Horowitz
1971: 1). One primary difference was found in the virtual lack of
indigenous people in the Caribbean. Another unusual factor, partly
responsible for the missing natives, was the predominance of
"vast agrarian factories" producing for overseas consumption. The
common features which Horowitz, nevertheless, thought war-
ranted treating the Caribbean as a single region were a mixture
of geography (most of the area consisting of small islands), history
(a shared European colonial background) and sociology (the preva-
lent stratification of local societies into a "dominant planter class"
and a "subordinate agricultural proletariat") (Horowitz 1971:2-5).
Horowitz's apologetic introduction to the Caribbean reader might
be regarded as an interesting reminder of a regional approach to
anthropology which has long ceased to be predominant: the study
of indigenous peoples rooted in their native soil and relatively
untouched by the modem world economy. Nevertheless, while
most anthropologists have a much broader view of anthropology
today, it is only in recent years that some of the basic assumptions
associated with the traditional approach to anthropology have been
challenged. The notion of "indigenous people," for example, is cur-
rently being subject to critical analysis, as anthropologists are
beginning to comprehend the complex political, economic, and cul-
tural ramifications of this term (Linnekin 1983; 1991; Keesing 1982;
1989; 1991; Jackson 1989).2 The idea that peoples and cultures can
be located in particular places, which constitute natural frame-
works of life, is also being re-examined by anthropologists in the
light of the mobile and globally interconnected lives which many
people lead today (Hannerz 1992; 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1992).
Some even argue that the tendency to conflate notions of society,
culture, and territory is related to European nationalist thinking
where the world is seen as a mosaic of nations juxtaposed one
against the other on the world map (Handler 1985; Gupta and
Ferguson 1992; Malkki 1992).
Caribbean Place Identify 439
There is no doubt that these more constructionist approaches to the
study of regions are most welcome in a Caribbean context. As noted
by Mintz (1996: 297), the basis for the construction of a Caribbean
regional entity "lies with the social frameworks created for cultur-
ally diverse migrant peoples who were subjected to centuries-
long processes of mostly forced cultural change by European rulers;

and with the long-term effects of those processes upon Caribbean
life." Though the sort of social frameworks which anthropologists
have found to be relevant in studies of the Caribbean have varied
through time, they can be grouped into roughly two major
approaches. One approach takes its point of departure in the shared
history of European colonization, local insular environments, and
externally imposed plantation structures of the geographically
defined area of the Caribbean, and examines the development of
local cultures and societies in terms of such concepts as "integra-
tion," "pluralism," "resistance and accommodation," "colonial,"
and "local" value systems or "creolization." These anthropologists
pay little attention to the physical mobility of Caribbean people and
its impact on local development (R. T. Smith 1996; M. G. Smith
1965; Mintz 1974; Mintz and Price 1976; Wilson 1973; Drummond
1980; Austin 1983; Olwig 1985). The other approach focuses on con-
temporary Caribbean relations and examines the increasing sig-
nificance of migration and non-local social fields of ties extending
well beyond the geographically defined Caribbean, and diasporic
cultural identities rooted in Caribbean homelands. This research
tradition views localities, such as the local community or the
nation-state, as inadequate frameworks of study which seriously
limit the scope of understanding of Caribbean people today
(Manners 1965; Philpott 1968; Hendricks 1974; Sutton 1987; 1992;
Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Georges 1990; Olwig
1993; Basch, Glide Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc 1994; Serensen 1995).
Whereas the first approach regards the Caribbean region as a
concrete geographical area, which has come to display certain soci-
etal and cultural commonalities, the second approach views the
Caribbean region as a socio-cultural construct of shared interests
and cultural identities which is grounded in the Caribbean area, yet
not confined to this area. This dichotomy does not do justice to the
complex interrelationship between global and local conditions of
life in the Caribbean. In the first approach little account is taken of
the cultural reflexivity of the inhabitants of the Caribbean. In the
second approach, however, the conscious identification with the
Caribbean becomes an important determining factor in identifying
440 Karen Fog Olwig
the relevant subjects of research, especially as this research moves
to studies of people who do not live in communities where people
of Caribbean origin predominate. While both of these two concep-
tualizations of the Caribbean region offer important insights I
would suggest that they reflect the particular positionings and con-
cerns of their anthropological constructors. The first, "local,"

approach represents the viewpoint of the traditional anthropologist
who does fieldwork in the Caribbean and wishes to establish an
adequate framework for monographic presentation and the com-
parative analysis of the field data. The second, "global," approach
represents the viewpoint of the metropolitan anthropologists who
have experienced the subjects of study as active and versatile mem-
bers of their own (metropolitan) society, as well as the societies
from whence they derive. Both approaches offer valuable, but also
only partial viewpoints. I shall here attempt to combine aspects of
these two approaches in the following study of the development of
family land on St. John.
Family land, I shall argue, has played a central role for the
African-Caribbean population as a response to life in the histori-
cally constituted societies of the Caribbean geographical area; as a
means of mobility away from the strictures of these societies to
areas of greater social and economic opportunity, and as a pivotal
point in the global fields of relations and local modes of identifica-
tion which are of central importance in Caribbean life today. Family
land was established by freed slaves during the nineteenth century
on the basis of social and economic communities which they began
to develop among themselves shortly after their subjugation under
European rulers (Besson 1995). It has served, since the nineteenth
century, as an important social, economic, and cultural site for Afro-
Caribbean people as they have staked out a life situated within
changing fields of global relations. Examined from the vantage
point of family land, the Caribbean region appears as a diffuse field
of socio-economic relations and cultural values, grounded in local
places, yet expanding and contracting as it interacts with wider
global networks of relations.
AN AFRICAN-CARIBBEAN CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE
When the Danes colonized St. John in 1717 they encountered a

small (19 square mile), unpopulated, mountainous island.3 Within a
few years they developed a plantation society producing sugar for
the overseas market in Europe with the help of a slave labor force
imported from Africa. When sugar production and the slave trade
peaked at the end of the nineteenth century, more than 1,800 acres,
virtually all the cultivatable land on St. John, was covered with
sugar, and the slave population numbered almost 2,500. During the
nineteenth century, as die world market for sugar deteriorated and

the trans-Atlantic slave trade was prohibited, sugar production
declined and the slave population diminished, as it failed to replen-
ish itself by natural reproduction due to a high mortality rate and
the freeing of individual slaves by their owners. Two years before
general emancipation of the slaves in the Danish West Indies in
1848, the acreage in sugar had decreased to 839 and the number of
slaves had declined to less than 1,800 (Olwig 1985: 16, 90). After
emancipation, the plantation society continued to decline, and by
the 1870s sugar production had virtually ceased, and the sugar
fields had been converted to pastures for the rearing of cattle. The
island suffered from serious depopulation as increasing numbers
left for work opportunities on neighboring St. Thomas, a regional
trade center, and other migration destinations in the circum-
Caribbean area. While St. John had been closely integrated into a
primarily European-based world economic system, it now became
incorporated within the social and economic system of the circum-
Caribbean area and Eastern North America. This was reflected in
outmigration to these areas. When Denmark sold the Danish West
Indies to the United States in 1917, less than 1,000 lived on St. John,
and this number decreased during the first part of the American
period to less than 800 in 1950 (Olwig 1985: 94,166).
St. John might be described as nothing more than a cross roads in
the wider system of global and regional relations which trans-
formed the island into first a center of sugar production in the
European colonial system, and then into a reserve of labor power to
be exploited wherever a work force was needed in the surrounding
areas. The islanders' population movements seem to confirm this
view. The present-day population is of recent origin, dating no fur-
ther back than 1717, the year of the island's colonization, and
through time great numbers have chosen to leave at the first oppor-
tunity to do so. This impression of St. John as merely a point of
transition, however, represents a very one-sided, external view. It
ignores the development of a St. Johnian community which came to
regard the island as a place of considerable social and cultural sig-
nificance, whether or not one was actually present in that place. The
442 Karen Fog Olxoig
St. Johnian institution of family land has played a central role in
this cultural construction of St. John as a place.
On St. John, family land usually consists of small plots of land
which originally had been parceled out and sold off from former
plantations. This land furthermore, often involves marginal land
which was of little use in sugar production. Indeed, some of the

areas of land sold off to the freed had never been used for sugar cul-
tivation during slavery, but had been allocated to the slaves so that
they might cultivate subsistence crops. A number of the estates on
St. John had always been unsuitable for large-scale sugar cultivation,
the island being rather mountainous and rocky, and some of them
were sold to the free Black or Colored population4 as early as the
eighteenth century. After the emancipation of the Danish West Indian
slaves in 1848, and the subsequent demise of sugar production on
the island, several other marginal land areas were parceled out and
disposed of to the freed population.
The most basic principle in St. Johnian family land is the fact that
it bestows upon each descendant of the original owner a right in
the land which can be activated whenever this should be desired.
A share in family land therefore grants a right to use the land, but
not a right to a particular piece of the land. Since all descendants,
men and women alike, inherit a claim in the land, the number of
heirs can increase considerably after just a few generations. Many
heirs will inherit a claim in more than one piece of land, having
received one or more claims from both parents. Given the small size
of most lots, however, few will ever be able to actually use the land.
Nevertheless, all can enjoy the knowledge that they have a right in
the land and that they have the possibility of activating this right
should they wish to do so. This right is inalienable because it is
generally understood that family land should never be sold but
remain in possession of all the heirs. This inalienability of the land
is underlined by the presence of a family burial ground on the land
which holds the graves of the original owner and other relatives
who have lived and died on the land. Selling the land therefore
involves, almost literally, selling the family.
The emergence of family land in the latter part of the nineteenth
century was the culmination of a long process which had begun
already during slavery. St. John, like many other mountainous
islands in the Caribbean, presented the sugar planters with a great
deal of marginal land which was not suitable for plantation cultiva-
tion on a large scale. This "wasteland" was turned over to slaves to
be used for subsistence cultivation and the raising of stock. In this
way, slaves were able to maintain themselves to a great extent, and
the planters could save on food importations from Europe and
North America. The common practice was to relieve slaves from
plantation work for two hours at noon during the week, all day
Sundays, and Saturday afternoons outside the period of sugar har-
vest which lasted for approximately half a year. By allowing the

slaves to develop their own subsistence economy the planters unin-
tentionally enabled them to create a place of their own where they
might develop social and economic ties with one another (cf. Mintz
1974, 1985) which were counter to the planters' policy of binding
slaves as "socially dead" individuals to individual plantations
(cf. Patterson 1982). By the end of slavery, the provision ground
areas in the border lands of the estates had essentially developed
into small village-like communities. The slaves spent an increasing
amount of their time in these communities, sometimes even staying
in small huts which they had built themselves. These areas of sub-
sistence cultivation cut across estate lines, and they were often
located in "wilderness" areas which were difficult to penetrate.
The communities of small farming which developed in the mar-
gins of the plantation society were further cemented by the family
relations which emerged among the slaves. The African slaves
arrived in the Caribbean as individualized units of labor, isolated
from kith and kin. As children were born to slaves kin groups
emerged on the individual plantations which became literally
grounded in the soil where deceased relatives were buried. While
the localized kin groups had a matrilateral bias, because children
always belonged to the mother's owner, kin ties outside the planta-
tion tended to have a patrilateral emphasis, being traced through
paternal relatives belonging to other plantations. The kin networks
on and off the plantations provided an important context of life for
the slaves that was closely related to their subsistence system. Even
though kinsmen usually lived in separate housing, provided by the
plantation owner, they often functioned as one household, sharing
crops from the provision grounds and cooking food for one another.
Families also provided protection and help in case of internal dis-
putes within the slave population, and external disputes with the
plantation manager.
The social and economic relations which the slaves established in
the domestic context thereby had the effect of rooting them in par-
ticular places. This was noted in a report to the governor general of
444 Karen Fog Olwig
the Danish West Indies by the local authorities on St. John:
"Negroes have strong local attachments and the comfortable houses
and a piece of good land for cultivation which our people all enjoy
and which the[y] are tought [sic] to consider as their own, together
with the stock which they all more or less raise, will I think form
ties, which they will not easily be endured to sever." A later letter to
the Danish government similarly describes the slaves as having a

"unique predilection for living and being buried on the place of
birth: 'the place where my navel string lies', as they express it"
(Olwig 1985: 41). The slaves thus appear to have developed a
strong attachment to place, which rooted them on the island,
whether in the small farming communities cutting across estates, or
in the family groups who had been born and buried in particular
localities.
The kind of attachment to place which the slaves developed, how-
ever, did not confine them to the plantation grounds, as the colonial
authorities might have wished, because this attachment was
grounded in a sphere of life which was positioned outside the plan-
tation regime. This suggests that the slaves valued a different form
of life than that defined by residence confined to the plantation.
Movement therefore became a valuable means whereby social and
economic resources elsewhere were explored and the strictures on
life imposed by planters were avoided. One might therefore speak of
a general practice of "cultural marronage" (Hall 1987), where slaves
withdrew from the alien plantation regime into a cultural sphere of
their own making. This withdrawal, of course, was most dramati-
cally displayed in actual physical marronage involving escapes from
the island. This kind of marronage increased greatly after the 1834
emancipation of slaves in the nearby British Virgin Islands.
At the time of emancipation in 1848,120 out of a slave population
of approximately 2,000 in 1838, were living outside St. John as
escapees.5 It is apparent from the detailed police investigations that
many more would have escaped had their ties on St. John not been
so strong. The importance of family is clearly brought out in a dis-
pute between two slaves concerning whether or not to escape to the
British islands. It erupted when they found themselves fishing alone
in a boat and thus had the possibility of fleeing. The one slave, who
had relatives on the British island of Jost van Dyke, wanted to
escape to that island, whereas the other slave, whose mother and
sister lived on St. John, refused (Olwig 1985: 80). The vast majority
of the slaves who did flee maintained close contact with the relatives
they left behind. Indeed, when a list was made of the 120 escapees a
few years after emancipation, all but four could be traced.6
Prior to British emancipation, intra-island marronage was more
widespread, and court records reveal that throughout the slave
period the St. John planters struggled with great numbers of run-
aways, who often managed to hide in the bush for weeks, even
months and years in some cases, before they were found. Maroons
apparently often fled to a spouse or paternal kin on another estate,
who harbored them on their subsistence plots. One example was a
slave who was maroon for 8 months in 1826. He spent about half of
this time with his spouse on another plantation, cultivating her pro-
vision ground there (Olwig 1985: 74). Such marronage did not com-
prise the primary form of mobility for the majority of the slaves. It
constituted only the most extreme form of movement in a much
more general pattern of mobility. This movement therefore was not
just a matter of escaping from the plantation, but also a matter of
going to a place located elsewhere that seems to have been regarded
as a form of home.
Mobility was also an integral part of life due to the nature of the
ties between slave couples. While maternal kin linkages were
rooted on the estate, relations between couples often involved
slaves from different estates. The emergence of localized maternal
kin groups during the period of slavery, was thus complemented
by a dispersal of affinal relations and paternal kin on different
estates. Contact with these relations could only effectively be main-
tained during the slaves' free time. Men often visited their wives
during the night, usually leaving the estate between 3 and 4 o'clock
in the morning, travelling along paths in the bush that were
unknown to white plantation society, causing some concern among
the authorities who had no effective control of their movement.
The slave community on St. John thus was characterized by what
might appear to be two opposite tendencies, but which were, in fact,
co-equal aspects of social practices which furthered the development
of place attachments which were alternative to those at the planta-
tion- This was, on the one hand, the tendency to root on the island by
developing kin groups grounded in the soil and establishing local-
ized communities of small farmers tilling the land; on the other, the
propensity to move in order to avoid the most severe strictures
imposed on life, primarily by the repressive system of slavery and
plantation cultivation. Rooting and movement were closely intercon-
nected: Rooting in the farming communities thus involved leaving
446 Karen Fog Olwig
the plantation area where the slaves spent most of their time; hav-
ing a family meant for many seeking a spouse on another estate;
escaping from the estate meant the possibility of staying with kin or
godparents on other plantations, often working on their provision
grounds there; fleeing from the island entailed exploring a host of
new opportunities, sometimes together with relatives who had also
escaped, sometimes alone but in close contact with relatives left

behind. After slavery, family land came to provide a place which
was able to accommodate and give expression to this "rooted
mobility."
FAMILY LAND
The form of emancipation which was declared in the Danish

West Indies in 1848, after a slave uprising on St. Croix, did not
bring about any major changes in the social and economic condi-
tion of the freed slaves. The Danish authorities instituted new regu-
lations to prevent the freed both from settling down in their own
communities of small farmers, and from moving away from the
plantations in pursuit of greater opportunities elsewhere. A labor
contract system was instituted tying the freed to their former own-
ers; the sale of small lots of land to laborers was made illegal and
the transport of people "from the laboring classes" away from the
island without consent of the local authorities was prohibited.
Subsistence wages were paid to the freed, who retained their right
to cultivate provision plots on the estates' marginal land. Before the
first contracts were to be renewed a few months after emancipation,
about 150 laborers had applied to leave their service. They wished
to either move away from the plantations, in order to live as squat-
ters cultivating the unused estate land on St. John, or they
explained that they wished to move to St. Thomas (where the labor
contract system never was brought into effect). A few also wanted
to visit family on Tortola for a limited period of time. All applica-
tions were refused and the freed forced to renew their contracts
(Olwig 1985:82-87). These conditions of emancipation left the freed
with little choice but to flee from the island, if they were unwilling
to submit themselves to slave-like conditions. Most fled to the
neighboring islands of St. Thomas or Tortola which were within
easy reach and which posed no formal restrictions on their free-
dom. Many also moved further on to more distant destinations in
the Caribbean.
In the late 1860s, most of the plantations on St. John ceased pro-
ducing sugar because of labor problems combined with decreasing
sugar prices and the destruction of buildings caused by a hurricane.
As a result, the labor restrictions were removed on St. John in 1872,
and St. Johnians finally were free to establish their own community
on the island. Within a couple of decades, the vast majority of the
remaining St. Johnians had moved away from the plantations and
settled as small farmers on land that they acquired. Many St.
Johnians furthermore had returned from St. Thomas to purchase
land with the earnings they had made there. It is apparent from the
land records, however, that the amount of land that the emanci-
pated and their descendants were able to acquire was extremely
limited. Almost 50% of the 192 land owners listed in the records in
1902 owned less than 5 acres of land, and more than 70% owned
less than 10 acres (Olwig 1985:98). The community of small farmers
clearly had a very limited economic basis. Movements to explore
opportunities outside the island therefore remained an important
aspect of life for St. Johnians, especially for young people. This is
reflected in the population statistics which show that the popula-
tion did not increase after 1870, but declined a little and then main-
tained its level at about 950 throughout the Danish period. After
transfer to American rule in 1917, when the islanders gained easy
access to the United States, the population decreased even further
and reached its lowest point in 1940 with 722 residents on the
island (Olwig 1985: 94,166).
The importance of having a place of one's own from which to
engage in acts of rooting and mobility was expressed by the elderly
St. Johnians interviewed during the 1970s. Leopold Jacobs, born in
the late 1880s, explained:
Here on St. John you can work all right, but when you are finished, you
just pick up your tools and go7home. [...] You can always manage when
you have a place of your own.
However, movement also constituted an important aspect of life.

Partly as a form of adventure, partly as a means of economic
improvement, he had, along with many other young St. Johnians,
travelled a great deal during his youth:
1 was young and adventurous, and we went anywhere that we wanted

to. You see the others going and they say that they will make headway.
And you believe them. And when you go for yourself, you see what is
448 Karen Fog Olwig
there: there is no truth in it. You have to work hard all about you go, and
in most countries you work harder than others. [...]
I bought my property at Bethany with the money that I had earned in
Guatamala. I worked there for $35 a month. They took $15 out for food,
which left $20. I sent $7.50 to the woman I had children with in
St. Thomas. [...] I then had $13.50 left, and I saved all of that. So I was
quite rich, when I came back. I bought the land right away, when I came
back in 1915.8
Mobility and rooting were therefore closely intertwined, with

mobility emphasized typically during early age, rooting at a later
age. Thus the wish to acquire a home of one's own on St. John
induced many to move away from the island. Knowledge of having
family land, and hence a place to construct a home on St. John,
enabled many in far-away destinations to return, to the island, even
though they might not have acquired the economic means to pur-
chase their own land. Family land thus came to play a central role
as an important cultural site for St. Johnians on and off the island.
Family land never created an economic basis for the growth of a
permanently settled peasant population on the island. Life history
interviews which I carried out with people living on family land
during the mid-1970s and 20 years later, during the mid-1990s,
showed that virtually everybody had lived outside the island for
part of their lives. Some had spent most of their youth off island
before returning to settle permanently on the land; others had con-
tinued to move in and out, sometimes maintaining homes both on
and off the island. During fieldwork I also constantly encountered
travellers from abroad who were visiting relatives living on the
land and often contemplating moving back to the land.
For the many who spend most of their lives far from the island,
family land has provided an important locus of belonging on
St. John as well as a central linchpin in the wider non-local commu-
nity of St. Johnians living and working outside the island. Family
land has thus allowed St. Johnians to maintain a social presence on,
and thereby a cultural attachment to, the island despite their physi-
cal absence. The land, furthermore, has enabled them to entertain
the idea that they might some day return to live on the island. Many
have therefore remained strongly attached to St. John and even suc-
ceeded in imparting this attachment to their children. Ina Lee, who
was born and raised of St. Johnian parents in New Jersey, thus
remembered her father refusing to purchase any property in New
Jersey, because he had land on St. John. It is almost as if he felt that
the very acquisition of land elsewhere would betray his loyalty
to St. John and the land he owned there. She heard so many stories
about her father's land on St. John that she eventually decided
to move to St. John to settle there, when her father died—without
ever having succeeded, himself, in returning to his land. She
explained:
The land I had in East Orange I didn't really feel was mine. Even though
I paid for it, it still wasn't mine because it wasn't my father's. And this is
what my father gave m]e, this is my gift. My father to his children, and it
was enough for all of us. So why stay up there?9
Even though a right in family land is inalienable there is a strong
feeling that relatives should maintain their right to be welcomed
back on the land as family by acting as family in relation to those
living on the land. This basically means extending economic and
other kinds of help when needed, and visiting as often as possible.
This reflects an implicit understanding that it is only because
most family members leave, that the land can become a physical
home for the few who stay, just as it is only because some relatives
live on the land and take care of it that it can remain a symbolic
home and place of belonging for the many who are absent from the
island.
Family land can be seen to have provided a useful response by
African-Caribbean people to the conditions of economic and social
marginality which have characterized the Caribbean since the abol-
ishment of slavery. It has provided both an actual place where peo-
ple might settle and create a life for themselves, and a more
symbolic family center for all relatives, whether or not this center
constitutes the physical home of individual members of the family.
The importance of family land therefore is found in its value as an
actual and imagined home for people who have had to make their
living as "hunters and gatherers" in the global economy, often in
distant places. Family land has thus been an important means of cre-
ating and sustaining local identities in a world where the conditions
of life are defined, to a great extent, by global social, economic, and
cultural relations. This point was brought home to me when I inter-
viewed Henry Powell.in 1994, a St. Johnian in his 40s who had spent
the major part of his life in the United States. When he heard that I
would like to interview him in connection with a research project on
migration, he objected vehemently to this, explaining that he had
never been a migrant who had left St. John to settle elsewhere. His
450 Karen Fog Olwig
identity was that of a St. Johnian, rooted on die island, regardless of
where he happened to have been located:
I don't see myself as somebody who ever migrated. I went away with
my parents as a kid and I always intended to go back. Even when I was
in Vietnam I thought about St. John. [...] You give away your birth right
if you sell out your land. It is like saying that you don't intend to come
back.10
From a historical point of view family land can be interpreted as a
rejection of the plantation regime which is associated with aliena-
tion, discontinuity, and homelessness in the historical experience of
the St. Johnians. Family land reversed this experience by turning a
piece of land into a permanent home and place of identity for all
the descendants of the first owner. This meaning of family land was
apparent in the oral history interviews which I carried out with
elderly St. Johnians who described the land, basically, as a place of
freedom and belonging. Leopold Jacobs explained,
I believe that there were slaves because the people had no home to go. It
is terrible to live so ... u
Family land also involves a denial of the economic perception of
land as property associated with the colonial society. What began as
a piece of private property, originally registered in the name of an
individual person was turned into common land to be held collec-
tively by all descendants of this original owner. The land thereby
became an icon of the family, both as a common point of origin for
all the descendants of the common ancestor and as a place where
they all had an eternal stake, whether or not they ever activated this
stake. This, in turn, means that what might have been a good eco-
nomic basis for one domestic unit's enterprising small farming
activities was turned into a largely cultural source of family unity,
continuity, and rootedness, as symbolized in the family burial
ground on the land. This, paradoxically, entailed the separation of
most of the family from the land, because it was apparent that the
land was quite inadequate as an economic resource for the entire
family, and most, not surprisingly, chose to leave voluntarily. This
willingness to leave was further related to the location of the land
in an economically marginal area on a small Caribbean island
which had long ceased to be of any importance in the larger world
economy. In this way the St. Johnians' treatment of the land as a
largely cultural and symbolic resource simultaneously constituted a
realistic appraisal of the land's limited economic possibilities.
Likewise, given the difficulty of making a living on the island and
the necessity of leaving it for economic opportunities elsewhere, the
designation of family land as a source of identification and a con-
crete place of potential return, granted the scattered family an
important gathering point and source of identity.
A CARIBBEAN SITE
Several studies have argued that migration became one of the

main strategies whereby the African-Caribbean people coped with
the social, economic, and political changes which took place in this
period of transition from slavery to freedom in the Caribbean
(Thomas-Hope 1978; 1992; 1995; Richardson 1983; 1989). Indeed,
Gmelch (1992: 3) claims that no other part of the world has experi-
enced population movements of the magnitude that the Caribbean
has witnessed since abolition of slavery. St. Johnian population sta-
tistics, as noted, certainly bear out the importance of outmigration
as a post-emancipation strategy. Indeed, one might even be
tempted to conclude that the freed essentially gave up life in the
local communities on St. John and left for better economic and
social opportunities outside the island. This explanation is too sim-
plistic, however. Indeed, it may be argued that, quite on the con-
trary, St. Johnians did not leave out of their own free will, but only
because they were prevented from establishing and further consoli-
dating the African-Caribbean communities which they had created
in the margins of the plantation society during slavery.
In a comparative study of landholding patterns in the African-
Caribbean Caribbean (Besson 1987) shows that family land has
been documented for much of the area, whether it has been associ-
ated with British, French, Dutch, or Danish colonial rule. Due to its
origins in the transformation of legally owned private property to a
commons shared by a kin group, family land has taken many differ-
ent forms in different parts of the Caribbean depending upon such
factors as its incorporation within specific legal systems, the nature
of the local economic systems, and the possibilities for economic
opportunity elsewhere. Caribbean family land, however, is gener-
ally described as inherited land which is held in common by all
descendants of the last private property holder.12 Descendants often
do not have title to particular plots of land, but rather hold a claim
in land. Most of them choose to forego their right to use the land,
452 Karen Fog Olurig
however, because it is of such a small size that it can accommodate
only a very limited number of people. Whether or not a claim is ever
activated, however, it is passed on to the following generations, the
entire family being the true owner of the land. Family land, Besson
notes, therefore has several puzzling characteristics. It is owned by a
family, yet the potential number of members in this family is unre-
stricted. As a result of this, a small plot of land is therefore held in

common by an ever widening circle of people. This, in turn, means
that even though all members of a family have a right to the land,
very few can actually make use of this right. This has led Besson
(1987: 13) to suggest that an important and paradoxical feature of
family land lies in its being considered both "an extremely scarce,
and an unlimited resource"—scarce because the property usually is
so small that it is of little practical use for the heirs; unlimited
because the symbolic value of identifying with family land, which
remains in possession of the family for generations to come, is
boundless.13
On the basis of this case study of family land on St. John, it may
be argued that this seemingly contradictory nature of family land is
related to the fact that it developed as a junctural institution where
African-Caribbean people might create a place of their own in the
extensive and hierarchical network of relations which have consti-
tuted their immediate context of life (cf. Olwig 1997). Family land
has offered enclaves in the colonial societies where social and eco-
nomic ties developed within the local African-Caribbean commu-
nity of kinsmen and friends. It has also provided an anchoring
point for African-Caribbean people engaged in acts of moving to
explore social and economic opportunities outside the confines of
local contexts of life, whether in the circum-Caribbean area, North
America, or Europe. Family land therefore has not just been a place
to settle and live, but also a place of belonging and identity for
those on the move. Indeed, the St. Johnian case suggests that the
strength of family land is that it has been able to accommodate the
seemingly contradictory acts of rooting and moving which have, in
fact, constituted mutually constitutive aspects of African-Caribbean
life for a long time. The significance of always having a home to go
to has remained highly relevant for the many younger generations
of Caribbean people, who have left to find employment elsewhere.
The sort of Caribbean which was made through the institution of
family land was therefore one of localized socio-cultural sites which
grounded many different, yet partially overlapping and ever
increasing, networks of relations extending to various parts of the
world.
Family land, of course, has not only provided a locus of harmony
and unification. There are cases of enterprising individuals who
have, for example, turned family land into profitable sources of
production for their own private benefit, ignoring the needs and
desires of absent relatives. Depending on the local legal system,
there are also examples of persons who have even been able to
manipulate the courts to gain clear title to the land and then pro-
ceeded to sell it or give it to persons outside the family (for exam-
ples see Rubenstein, 1987 or Crichlow, 1994). Such behavior, my
interviews suggest, is regarded as very much against the ethos of
family land, as long as there are relatives who show an active inter-
est in the land and value its remaining within the family. Stories
about such usage of family land therefore do not deny the validity
of family land as a social and cultural institution, but rather serve
for the narrators as negative examples validating its moral founda-
tion. At the same time, for the outside observer they point to the
precarious position of family land in the interplay between local
and global contexts in the lives of Caribbean people.
It may be argued, from an outside perspective, that family land
has been well adapted to the peripheral economies which developed
in the Caribbean after the collapse of the plantation systems in the
latter part of the nineteenth century. Family land provided a conve-
nient resource for the reproduction of a reserve labor force which
could be used on marginally profitable cattle estates and in domestic
service in the more well-to-do homes within the local community. It
also provided support for the migration of labor to distant destina-
tions in the circum-Caribbean area, North America and, later,
Europe. This perspective, however, does not invalidate the insider's
perception of family land as a bulwark against these consequences
of economic peripheralization. There are, however, built in contra-
dictions between the desire to maintain family land as such a bul-
wark and the changing character of the economic relations between
the island society and the economic metropoles. The difficulty of
maintaining family land as a central cultural site in an area of capi-
talist development and economic growth has become apparent on
St. John since the 1950s, when the United States Virgin Islands have
seen the rise of a major American tourist industry which has led to a
phenomenal rise in property values. On St. John, this tourism has
been of a particular kind, because most of the island has been turned
454 Karen Fog Olwig
into a national park owned and operated by the National Park
Service in the United States.
CULTURAL SITES IN A TOURIST INDUSTRY

During the mid-1950s Laurance Rockefeller purchased most of

the old cattle estates on St. John and gave them to The United States
National Park Service so that they might be turned into a nature
area park.14 When the park was opened in 1956 its boundaries cir-
cumscribed about two thirds of the island's acreage. Since then,
guest houses, hotels, vacation homes, and various tourist related
businesses have been constructed on much of the remaining private
land, and the island's population has increased from less than 750
in 1950 to more than 3,500 in 1990. Investors and workers in the
tourist industry have moved to the island from North America and
the surrounding West Indian islands. As a result, land has become
an object of profit and speculation leading to highly inflated prop-
erty values. An acre of land which was bought and sold for $20
during the 1940s was worth several hundred thousand dollars dur-
ing the 1990s. Due to the high commercial value of the land prop-
erty taxes have skyrocketed, and it is now a major effort for those in
charge of family land to collect the funds necessary to pay the taxes
among all the relatives who legally have a share in the land and
therefore are responsible for contributing to its maintenance. It
therefore has been necessary for many families to divide the land
among smaller groups of relatives, such as siblings, or even among
single owners. Many of the absent relatives who no longer have
any personal contact with St. John have sold their portion of the
land in order to free the considerable capital now tied to the land
and avoid paying the ever increasing taxes levied on the property.15
This land has been sold primarily to wealthy Americans, since very
few local people can afford to purchase land on the island today.
Those who still have close ties to St. John have attempted to
make sure that the land continues to provide a home for the family.
One family, consisting of a group of brothers and sisters several of
whom were away from the island, allowed each member of the
family living on St. John toacquire title to one small house lot, but
kept the rest of the land undivided for the entire family to enjoy
whenever they were on the island. They also stipulated that the
house lots, if ever put on the market, must first be offered below
the market price to the family. Another family similarly allowed
individuals living on St. John to acquire their own house lots, but
preserved the parental house, and the land on which it was located,
as a family home for visiting relatives or any relative in need. The
idea of family land therefore seems to have been transformed into a
notion of family home, reflecting the changing economic conditions
where the land has become a scarce resource of little significance in

agricultural production, but of central importance as a place of resi-
dence. It also, of course, reflects the improved means of communi-
cation today, where a plane trip from New York or Atlanta to the
Virgin Islands lasts a few hours and is well within the means of
many wage earners. The decline of family land therefore does not
reflect the demise of a vital pivot in the St. Johnian community, but
rather an adjustment of this pivot due to the changes in the local
and the global spaces which shape this community.
Family land is not just important as the physical site of a family
home, but also as a more general site of cultural identity. This is
apparent in the many family reunions which take place every year
at the time of the Fourth of July Festival which has been held on St.
John since the early American period. The reunion of St. John fami-
lies, many of whom share family land, is incidental to the festival,
but the festival, nevertheless, provides an important site in which
the activities of particular globalized families overlap with a more
generalized reunion of people who feel an attachment to the island.
This festival began as a small-scale celebration of the American
Independence Day, which involved the singing of patriotic songs
and a parade. During the 1970s, when I first carried out fieldwork
on St. John, the festival had developed into a fairly modest cultural
festival which included traditional North American games (such as
climbing a greased pole), the sale of local foods, music, and a
parade. At this time, the festival placed more emphasis on the
island's African-Caribbean heritage, and it had also begun to cele-
brate the Third of July, the day of the slaves' emancipation in the
American Virgin Islands. Since then, the event has developed into a
large festival lasting over a week, featuring the crowning of Miss St.
John, a calypso show, and fireworks (Burton n.d., 1990). This mod-
ern festival is part of a more general pan-Caribbean cultural move-
ment of cultural expression where particular island identities,
associated with local culture and history, are articulated within
global structures of identity politics. As is the case throughout the
Caribbean, this festival is the creation of local intellectuals and
political leaders as well as the chamber of commerce and business
456 Karen Fog Olvrig
interests, both continental American and local St. Johnian. This
complex celebration of St. John culture and history has offered a
venue whereby a large number of first, second, and third genera-
tion St. Johnians in the United States can cultivate their "Caribbean
roots." They do this at a more abstract cultural and historical level
by attending the events of the festival, and at a more personal level

by holding family reunions. To a certain extent, the combination of
Caribbean style carnival with the reunion of families, therefore
works to provide a focal point of cultural identification which links
the local and the global members of the St. Johnian community
together within frameworks ranging from the scale of the family
and family land to that of the island, and the Virgin Islands more
generally, to that of the wider international Caribbean community.
The close connection between being part of the St. Johnian com-
munity and belonging to a large family with a strong home base
in family land was observed by a member of one of the few
St. Johnians interviewed whose family had not owned land. His
feeling of not really belonging on St. John derived from the fact that
his family was identified with one of the few remaining cattle
estates where his grandfather had been an estate laborer. Due to
this lack of family land he therefore did not belong to a large net-
work of relatives who all identified with a particular piece of land
and the local community where it was located. This lack of rooting
in a strong St. Johnian family was brought out especially clearly at
the Fourth of July Festival when the "real" St. Johnian families
gathered on the island:
I just didn't feel included on St. John. There are special occasions where
it is important to be part of a large family. At the Fourth of July
Celebration, for example, large families, like the Samuels and the
Dalmidas, have booths where they sell local food. Some of these families
also have reunions at this time. The Samuels and the Marshes have had
such reunions. It is known that most St. Johnians are interrelated, but my
family didn't have a name. You are asked on St. Thomas what your
name is, and you say James, and they look incredulous—James? They
never heard about that family on St. John.
My grandfather Windfield James lived on Carolina estate as a laborer,
and he never owned any land of his own, he owned nothing. Also he
had mostly daughters, so the James family was not one of the known
families on St. John. So I really didn't feel that I belonged to a local family
of any importance, such as the Samuels, Sprauves, or Sewers, and there-
fore I didn't quite feel I was part of the local community. I cannot think of
any examples of being treated badly by anybody [...] it was mostly my
not feeling good, or my not feeling mat the community embraced me.16
While some of the families which he mentioned included branches
which had owned large estates and therefore would have had a
higher social and economic standing in the local community, others
owned only small pieces of family land totalling a few acres. The
size of the land holding, and the social and economic possibilities
which it offered in the local society, was therefore not the important
determining factor in establishing which family was included on
St. John. It was the sustaining and cherishing of land as a home and
source of family identity for relatives on as well as off the island
which gave certain families such a strong presence in the
St. Johnian community.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE CARIBBEAN REGION
In a critical review of the anthropological concept of the region

Richard Fardon has noted that "the definition of region has been
largely a political question" (1990:25); anthropologists have demar-
cated areas according to their involvement with European colonial
powers. Regions, to him, are therefore largely external structures,
constructed by anthropologists as a way of subdividing the world
into more manageable areas of research and scholarly debate. In the
case of the Caribbean, however, it may be argued that the region is
more than just a figment of the anthropological imagination. The
very fact of being incorporated within a common colonial frame-
work has important implications for the sort of local society and
culture which developed. Here the uniformity was not so much
due to the area's political affiliation to a particular European colo-
nial government, the Caribbean being subjected to colonial rule by
several different European countries. It rather resulted from the
widespread imposition of the comprehensive system of plantation
agriculture, involving massive importations of African labor, fol-
lowed by an uneven process of social and economic marginaliza-
tion, which led to equally massive population movements both
within and beyond the Caribbean.
The Caribbean is not just the geographic area on the map charac-
terized by particular social, economic, and cultural development,
but also the multitude of non-local, partially overlapping fields of
social and economic relations extending to different parts of the
world, which are grounded in cultural sites within the geographic
Caribbean. In recent years social scientists have become interested
458 Karen Fog Olwig
in the existence of these systems of interaction, which are not
confined to particular places, but develop and thrive in fields of
relations between places and the socio-cultural encounters which
such fields involve. Several studies have dealt with the Caribbean;
indeed, the Caribbean seems to have become an important source
of inspiration for students of global systems. The historical emer-

gence of a "Black Atlantic" connecting African, European, Caribbean,
and American culture has been discussed by die sociologist Paul
Gilroy (1993); the twentieth century development of a West Atlantic
system spanning the eastern corridor of North America and the
Caribbean has been delineated by Patterson (1987); the present-day
significance of trans-national socio-cultural systems, which tie
Caribbean migrants in the Northeastern part of the United States
with the various parts of the Caribbean from where they derive, has
been documented by a number of anthropologists (Sutton 1987,
1998; Georges 1990; and Fouron 1990; Basch, Schiller, and Szanton-
Blanc 1994). These studies all point to the significance of wider net-
works of relationships as important arenas of modern Caribbean
life. As anthropologists have become aware of the relevance of such
non-local frameworks of life, they have become less concerned with
determining the nature of Caribbean societies, a topic which preoc-
cupied, and rather dead-locked, much earlier anthropological
research on the Caribbean.
Not only anthropologists and social scientists, however, create
places and regions. The people whom we study are also engaged in
this practice. Thus at the same time as anthropologists have argued
against the a priori existence of distinct peoples and cultures, they
have become increasingly aware that places do exist as social and
cultural constructions which have an important bearing on those
who identify with them. The idea of local communities and places
of belonging is of great social and cultural importance in large, com-
plex societies (Cohen 1982); notions of "homeland" figure promi-
nently among diasporic populations (Appadurai 1996; Clifford
1994); indeed, topical metaphors are more dominant than ever in
social discourse in modern society (Malkki 1992). It is therefore
understandable and well justified that place has come to constitute
a significant framework of presentation and analysis within ethno-
graphic writing. This concern with place remains problematic, how-
ever, if, as argued by Appadurai (1996: 182), "most ethnographic
descriptions have taken locality as ground not figure, recognizing
neither its fragility nor its ethos as a property of social life."
One way of avoiding such reification of place is by taking a point
of departure in studies of the ways in which local cultures, nations,
and larger regions are constructed by communities of people as
they situate and demarcate themselves in relation to the wider net-
work of relations of which they are part. I have here examined the
cultural construction of family land on St. John and argued that it

became a central institution, because it played a pivotal role as a
cultural site, sustaining local identities in a global network of social
and economic relations, particularly during the long period after
emancipation of the slaves when the African-Caribbean people con-
stituted a mobile labor force in the global economy grounded in
subsistence economies in the Caribbean.
The importance of maintaining a cultural site, in the form of
family land or a family home, within the networks of local and
global relations which frame Caribbean life is apparent throughout
the region. In those areas where the local economy is less developed
than in the American Virgin Islands, the cultivation of such sites
finds a salient expression in the migrants' sending of remittances to
those living in the family home on the island of origin. This help is
extended, partly out of a feeling of filial duty and gratitude toward
parents, but also partly out of a desire to maintain a stake in the
home. This wish is recognized by the family, and it is generally
accepted that the family home belongs to those who have helped
and cared for the parents, either by being present in the home, or by
providing the economic basis for the domestic unit associated with
this home (Rubenstein 1987; Olwig 1997). The involvement of
absentee relatives has been so strong that it is now common to
speak of global or trans-national households, with the providers
living primarily in the industrialized West, the caretakers in the
Caribbean (Soto 1987; Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992;
Olwig 1993; Baud 1994; S0rensen 1995).
Most research on such trans-national households has emphasized
the more practical social and economic aspects of these domestic
arrangements. I would suggest that they also embody the notion of
a home which provides an important place of identification and
rootedness. This cultural, symbolic dimension assumes greater sig-
nificance as the concrete familial ties become more distant and,
hence, weaker. A home, in this wider, symbolic sense of the word,
can be cultivated at cultural festivals which celebrate traditional
West Indian dances, music and food, and where one can celebrate
the family ties to the island at formalized family reunions. Cultural
festivals, similar to the Fourth of July Festival on St. John, have
appeared as noted in much of the Caribbean during the last two-to-
three decades. These nationalist festivals have been interpreted in
the light of the establishment of independent nation-states which
need to develop and assert some sort of local, national culture
within the international communities of nation-states (Wilk 1995).

The Caribbean islands, however, are not just home for the residents
of me new independent nation-states, but also for the large global
communities of people who regard them as an important place of
cultural identity. Indeed, in some cases, it has been argued, a signif-
icant economic and sodal basis of these nation-states must be found
in the extra-territorial fields of inter-personal relations within which
they are situated (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992;
Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994). The significance of
these festivals as points of identification and rooting in the
Caribbean for the wider, global community of "nationals" who
wish to maintain a personal, economic, and, perhaps, political inter-
est in their Caribbean place of origin therefore should also be recog-
nized. It is interesting to note, however, that even though a festival
such as the St. John Fourth of July, is primarily of significance for
the construction and perpetuation of place identitities focused upon
the local island community, this process of construction takes place
through the medium of a carnival festivity with pan-Caribbean
roots—not to forget the festivity's connection to the day of US
Independence (which happens to fall one day before Emandpation
day in the 'Virgin Islands). St. Johnian place identity is thus cele-
brated within a pan-Caribbean cultural form which is familiar to
most, if not all, St. Johnians from their sojourns on other Caribbean
islands or in Caribbean communities abroad.
Family land sustained primarily local island, or family, identities.
However, the patterns of mobility which it facilitated created the
basis for the development of inter-island relations among migrant
laborers from different Caribbean sodeties, which might lead to the
emergence of regional identities. Such regional identities have
become apparent among more settled migrant populations, in par-
ticular in major metropolitan areas, where large populations of
Caribbean origin have lived for several generations. Here impor-
tant aspects of Caribbean life have not necessarily been grounded
in the Caribbean geographic area, but rather in pan-Caribbean com-
munities in North America and Europe. Indeed, cultural festivals,
such as the Caribana in Toronto or the West Indian Carnivals in
Brooklyn, Boston, London, and Leeds, have become important
demarcators of Caribbean culture, without being physically located
in the Caribbean. Caribbean musical forms, for example reggae,
calypso and salsa, and religious movements, such as Rastafari or
Santeria, also seem to have become important loci for Caribbean cul-
ture, whether located within or outside the Caribbean basin. Among

these people of Caribbean origin there has also been an increasing
interest in visiting their "homeland" in the Caribbean, and many of
the cultural festivals which have emerged there during recent
decades can be seen, partly as a response to this absentee construction
of a cultural homeland, partly as a result of the wish to assert local,
and in some cases national, identities in an increasingly global world.
These studies, therefore, remind us that geographically defined
places or regions may not constitute the most relevant frameworks
of life in the modern world. This does not make the study of place
obsolete. On the contrary, as Sutton (1992) has noted, the construc-
tion of places is an urgent task for anthropologists to investigate,
which allows for the study of the close, and mutually constitutive,
relationship between local and global spheres of life. It is in this
interplay between diffuse fields of relations in space and the cul-
tural sites which ground these relations in communities of local life
in place that anthropologists can study the making and remaking of
the Caribbean.
NOTES
Dr. Karen Fog Olwig

Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Frederiksholms Kanal 4, DK-120 Copenhagen k
Acknowledgments: Research for this paper was founded by the Danish Research
Council of the Humanities (1974-75) and the Virgin Islands Council of the
Humanities (1994). The latter research was carried out in collaboration with the St.
John Oral History Association. I would like to thank Antonio Lauria, Nina Glide
Schiller, and Kenneth Olwig for their penetrating and helpful critique of this paper.
Finally, I wish to thank Ulf Hannerz for his useful comments on an earlier version of
this paper presented at the meeting of the European Association of Social
Anthropologists, Barcelona, 1996.
KAREN FOG OLWIG is an associate professor at the Institute of Anthropology, the

University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Since the 1970s she has studied African-
Caribbean culture on the basis of fieldwork in the Caribbean, North America, and
Great Britian. Her publications include Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St. John:
Three Centuries of Afro-Caribbean Life, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1985,
and Global Culture and Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean
Community of Nevis, Reading: Harwood Academic Press, 1993. Her current research
concerns a study of global family networks of Caribbean origin.
1. A comparative analysis of these different constructions of place, and their articu-

lation with patterns of mobility, would lead to a broader understanding of the
complexity of the Caribbean as a region. This, unfortunately, is beyond the scope

of the present paper.
2. Far from being merely the "natural" quality of people who are unselfconsciously
grounded in the lands of their forefathers, the state of being "indigenous" has
become a much coveted status associated with significant political and economic
privileges. "Indigenous" status therefore is actively sought after by fourth world
people as they become involved in identity politics in the global arena.
3. This historical discussion is based on Olwig (1985).
4. In the Danish West Indies, the term colored was applied to persons of mixed
European and African background. The term black was applied to persons of
only African background.
5. The figure of 120 does not include all those who escaped, but were caught and
returned to St John. A certain number of St. Johnian slaves were caught when
they moved from the British Virgin Islands to St. Thomas. No slaves were
returned by the British authorities to the Danish islands.
6. It showed that 62, or 52%, were still on Tortola. Some had moved back to the
Danish islands after an uprising on Tortola in 1853, nine of them returning to St.
John. A total of 36 were living in St. Thomas, some of them having left Tortola
before the uprising. The others had moved to St Thomas already during slavery
(NA Box 1904). Here they were able to live on "wharf-related work or itinerant
vending" without much interference from the police who apparently were
known for their "notorious laxity" (Hall 1985: 489). The laxity of the police there
was related to the fact that St. Thomas was dominated by free trade and a free
market economy due to the importance of the international entrepot in Charlotte
Amalie and therefore needed a free and mobile wage labor force. For some of the
escapees, St. Thomas had only served as a first stepping stone to engage in even
wider ranging economic activities. Thus, nine had left the Virgin Islands, one
had travelled to St. Kitts, one to North America, and five to Trinidad (NA Box
1904). Apparently many Virgin Islanders were induced to go to Trinidad by
agents who offered free passage and daily wages of 1.75 dollars (LA 33: June 10,
1840).
7. Leopold Jacobs, 1974.
9. Ina Lee, 1994.
10. Henry Powell, 1994.
12. Jean Besson has carried out in depth research on family land in specific Jamaican
communities as well as extensive comparative studies of family land in the
Caribbean region in general (Besson 1984; 1987; 1995). This general description
of Caribbean family land draws upon her work. For other recent analyses of
Caribbean family land see Rubenstein 1987; Crichlow 1994; Olwig 1997.
13. Besson argues that family land, and the corporate, unrestricted descent groups
which own it, comprise important foci in the African-Caribbean communities
which developed after emancipation in the margins of European colonial
societies as a "mode of resistant response to the plantation system and imposed
colonial cultures" (Besson 1987: 37). This interpretation has been countered by
Crichlow (1994) who has argued that family land is not an institutionally sepa-
rate institution of primary symbolic value, but merely one of several forms of
property holding of significance in the agricultural system of small holders. She
therefore concludes that its main value is as an economic resource which may
even be sold, if special conditions should warrant this. I shall here suggest that
because family land developed in the interstices of the many different relations
of global and local dimension which have influenced African-Caribbean life
through time it is an inherently ambiguous and flexible institution. This means
that it can take on different forms depending upon the social, economic, and
legal framework within which it has developed.
14. The importance of land in the St. Johnian community today is discussed in more
detail in Olwig (1994).
15. For further documentation of this, see Olwig (1994).
16. Marquise James, 1995.
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Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power

Caribbean place identity: From family land to region

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.1999.9962626

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Land to Region and Beyond

Karen Fog Olwig

This paper argues that a useful point of departure for ethnographic

Key Words: African-Caribbean culture. The Caribbean region, Family land,

The growing awareness of the social, economic, and cultural con-

not mean, however, that notions of region, place, or nation, more

Caribbean background and provided important loci of belonging

Around 1970 the American Museum of Natural History pub-

long processes of mostly forced cultural change by European rulers;

cerns of their anthropological constructors. The first, "local,"

AN AFRICAN-CARIBBEAN CONSTRUCTION OF PLACE

When the Danes colonized St. John in 1717 they encountered a

nineteenth century, as die world market for sugar deteriorated and

which was of little use in sugar production. Indeed, some of the

vest which lasted for approximately half a year. By allowing the

the Danish government similarly describes the slaves as having a

escaped, sometimes alone but in close contact with relatives left

The form of emancipation which was declared in the Danish

However, movement also constituted an important aspect of life.

1 was young and adventurous, and we went anywhere that we wanted

Mobility and rooting were therefore closely intertwined, with

Several studies have argued that migration became one of the

stricted. As a result of this, a small plot of land is therefore held in

CULTURAL SITES IN A TOURIST INDUSTRY

During the mid-1950s Laurance Rockefeller purchased most of

where the land has become a scarce resource of little significance in

by attending the events of the festival, and at a more personal level

CONCEPTUALIZING THE CARIBBEAN REGION

In a critical review of the anthropological concept of the region

of inspiration for students of global systems. The historical emer-

cultural construction of family land on St. John and argued that it

within the international communities of nation-states (Wilk 1995).

ture, whether located within or outside the Caribbean basin. Among

Dr. Karen Fog Olwig

KAREN FOG OLWIG is an associate professor at the Institute of Anthropology, the

1. A comparative analysis of these different constructions of place, and their articu-

complexity of the Caribbean as a region. This, unfortunately, is beyond the scope

1994 An Alternative Approach to Family Land Tenure in the Anglophone

Dialectical Anthropology 14: 127-43.

Nevis. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.

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