ABSTRACT
It can be claimed that the social and cultural anthropology of the Caribbean has been made peripheral to the core of the discipline. This is because of the ways anthropology became professionalized and the concomitant epistemological requirements to look for, and create if necessary, ‘pristine’ *cultures and *social structures. This situation is not a reflection of the Caribbean’s intrinsic anthropological value. Centuries of hegemonic *colonialism, *migration, *slavery and forced labour, miscegenation, and ‘derivative’ cultures broken off from their places of origin, all meant that anthropology defined the Caribbean as ‘hybrid’ and †‘creole’. Thus, anthropology’s ‘othering’ enterprisesimultaneously providing a subject for, and ordering status within, the discipline (the more ‘other’ the better)—made the Caribbean anthropologlcally inferior to more ‘exotic’ ethnographic locales.
