The Garifuna, A Nation Across Borders: Essays in Social Anthropology by Joseph A. Palacio (ed.)

The Garifuna have received increased attention from anthropologists in recent years as a paradigmatic hybrid and transstatal Caribbean society. Descended from Africans and Amerindians on the island of St. Vincent, they resisted British colonialism and eventually extended their residence across Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and, more recently, the United States. This volume makes original contributions to existing analyses of Garifuna transnationalism and offers suggestive theoretical leads for comparison. It is comprised of 11 separate essays edited and assembled by a professional anthropologist who is also Garifuna. As such, it bridges ‘‘outsider’’ and ‘‘insider’’ description and analysis, to good effect. The chapters range from translations of new 18th-century sources describing ethnogenesis on St. Vincent (Hulme), to techniques on the use of oral history (Palacio), to assessments of local authority under colonial rule in Central America (Moberg); and from interests in ritual (Arrivillaga, Foster) to gender (Gargallo, Foster) to music (Green) and the politics of cultural recognition (Izard, Cayetano, and Cayetano). Yet the variety of places (both written-from and written-about), historical periods, methods, and interests succeeds at showing ‘‘The Garifuna’’ thickly and complexly; or as a long and still-unfolding trajectory rather than an easily bounded thing. The book thus suggests by its own example that ‘‘a culture’’ is less a thoroughgoing concord of thought, speech, and action than a modest consensus about what subjects to disagree about, and where, and how. Palacio shepherds the unruly chapters into two sections, one on ‘‘Charting New Grounds in Garifuna History,’’ the other on ‘‘Topics on Contemporary Garifuna Society.’’ The division is less stark than it sounds; the first section discusses the various ‘‘presents’’ of the past, while the second engages various ‘‘pasts’’ of the present. For example, Alfonso Arrivillaga’s chapter on the Garifuna establishment of Livingston, Guatemala by Marcos Sanchez Diaz in 1802 (or alternatively, 1804) recounts both a history of the founding and a history of that history. Diaz was memorialized first as ‘‘hero’’ and rallying point for contemporary cultural activists and then as a hiuraha, a living ancestral spirit who returns in ritual practice. Here we see that ‘‘Garifuna history’’ is a kind of active consciousnessFa practical history that uses multiple sources and integrated media (or ‘‘interart,’’ as Green calls it). Garifuna history is physically engagedFdanced, sung, eaten, and drummed into existence. Yet, as chapters by Foster and Gargallo make clear for gender relations, even ritual contexts of practical history-making cannot enforce consensus so much as afford a shared grammar, scene, and repertoire for conflict. Garifuna-ness, this book makes clear, may be not so much a characteristic people as a group of people engaged in a characteristic set of debates. Those debates are about Garifuna religion and ‘‘tradition,’’ gender relations, the relation of the Garifuna nation to host states, and the need (or not) for official cultural recognition. These comprise the volume’s unifying vectors.