Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks (review)

The topic of migration and home resonated as I read this book against the backdrop of the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti. Immigrant friends in Brooklyn, a site of my own research, gathered their resources and launched untold family and community relief efforts in counterpoint to those of large international organizations. Indeed, the family network, skillfully documented and explored through life-story interviews in this book by Karen Fog Olwig, offers a fertile field for migration studies in the Caribbean and beyond.

Three sets of family narratives structure the book. The author based her selection of these families on their distinct places of origin—Jamaica, Dominica, and Nevis—and their diverse social and economic backgrounds. The middle-class and racially mixed Muirs of Jamaica trace their roots to a British colonial town, where they engaged in trade and commerce. The Gaston family of Dominica originated in a French creole community of small plantation owners, where the father held the position of local schoolmaster and, by virtue of that position, mediated between the village and the world beyond. The Smiths of Nevis located their home in an African Caribbean village founded by laborers who took on small farming and fishing when the British abandoned their sugar plantations in the early twentieth century. Olwig devotes two chapters to each family network. The first chapters draw on life stories and secondary sources to construct the historical backgrounds of the respective families, yielding "narratives of origin" and "notions of relatedness" (32) essential to understanding how individuals will experience their life trajectories. The second chapters trace these trajectories from the three island homes into Europe, North America, and other Caribbean states as the migrants seek the betterment of themselves and their families. In her final three chapters, the author compares the three sets of migratory journeys, exploring the ways in which the first, second, and third generations account for their personal experiences against the families' foundational stories at the same time that they reinterpret those stories in light of their experiences. Olwig also critiques frameworks in the anthropology of migration while arguing for an approach that focuses on the oral histories of migrants.

Caribbean Journeys addresses questions and issues in anthropology, the author's discipline. Consequently, the theory and methodology of oral history do not occupy center stage in this work. Olwig provides a genealogy chart at the outset of each family section, and the reader infers while working through the section that she interviewed most family members, with an apparent emphasis on the first generation. She does not provide a list of interviews, and they are not included in References (297-310). In her Introduction, Olwig outlines her own trajectory within a discussion of what constitutes a "field." Over a span of four years, "I spent approximately six months visiting and interviewing 150 members of the three dispersed family networks" (22). This statement would have benefited from further detail since the figure 150 exceeds the number of living family named in the genealogies.

The work stands out, then, for its application of oral history to the concerns of another discipline, in this case, anthropology, and more specifically, the anthropology of migration. Noting that migration research, typically set in the ethnic communities of Europe and North America, has focused on such themes as push-pull factors, assimilation or the lack of it, and identity politics, the author demonstrates how the investigation of life-story narratives captures a more complex tableau of migration experiences. Such narratives, for example, might reveal that actors "respond less to external push-pull factors than to the internal drives of personal and family ambition and measures of achievement set by the society of their origin" (21). Consequently, the life-history approach, which emphasizes personal histories of movement and emplacement, suggests new methodological and analytic frameworks potentially more fruitful than the frameworks of integration and resistance dominant in research on migration...