ABSTRACT
During my first period of West Indian fieldwork, on St. John in the Virgin Islands, I became friends with a woman from the island who had been educated at an American college where she had taken a few courses in anthropology. She was very interested in my research but asked me whether I had been disappointed when I learned that the islanders were not more primitive? At the time I found her question amusing. Anthropological fieldwork was rather well-established in the Caribbean at this time—the mid-1970s—and it was even becoming increasingly common in the heart of the industrial West. Anthropology clearly was not just the study of primitive cultures as she had been led to believe in the college courses that she had taken during the early 1960s. The perception of anthropology which my friend expressed seemed to me, then, to be curiously old-fashioned and naive. Nevertheless, it has had a profound influence on the field, molding the development of theory and method. This is not unproblematic when studying an area which has been characterized as one of “the most Westernized of the modern world” (Mintz 1971 [1966]:37).
