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

Karen Fog Olwig continues to find innovative ways to narrate the relentlessly mobile lives of Caribbean peoples. In this her latest book, she concentrates on three families: one originating in Jamaica, another in Dominica, and the third in Nevis. Olwig travels to England, various parts of Canada, the United States and the Caribbean to do life-history interviews with some 150 members of these extended families, spread across three generations. Their life stories not only cross geopolitical and generational boundaries, but also trace the careers of individuals and families from very different socio-economic backgrounds and straddle the crucial political transition from colonial to post-colonial, national status in the Caribbean. While not claiming to be representative, Olwig's account offers an illuminating approach to the complexity of "Caribbean" social life in its global dimensions.

In a way reminiscent of Lila Abu-Lughod's advocacy of the need for "ethnographies of the particular," to counter the homogenizing, overly structured tendencies of social science accounts, Olwig allows readers to appreciate the serendipitous pathways Caribbean travelers take, the variety of outcomes to which they lead, and the ways in which these migrants make themselves at home in their journeys (Abu-Lughod 1991). Though for most of her informants their Caribbeanness is a given, it is not asserted necessarily as an ethnic identity that supersedes other ways of representing themselves. Nor do ideas about blended or transcendent identities—as analytical constructs such as 'diaspora' and 'hybridity' might suggest—adequately convey how Olwig's subjects see themselves. The notion of the "hybridized" subject, no less than that of the "ethnic" subject, which in some ways it sought to replace, both are anchored, Olwig argues, in the nation-state imaginary that continues to constrain the social science imagination.

While she applauds many of the critical gains that have been made in the study of migration, Olwig nonetheless sees much of the recent work in the field as still having a common frame of reference in the metropolitan countries to which migrants from places like the Caribbean go. "Thus, they study immigration, not migration; forms of incorporation into a migration destination, not life trajectories unfolding in a wide variety of places throughout the world; cultural expressions of minority populations, not the cultural contexts of life that people seek to establish within vibrant socioeconomic environments" (pp. 242-243). By contrast, Olwig shifts the focus to the second term in each of the foregoing binaries; she seeks in this book "to shift the focus of study from the point of view of the receiving country to the perspective of those who move by exploring the role of migration within a Caribbean framework" (p. 243). However, what this means for Olwig is not simply a return to "regional ethnography that can have only limited interest to those who are not area specialists." It calls for "abandoning national frameworks of investigation defined by contemporary social concerns and cultural politics and returning to in-depth research on the relationship between physical movement, social position, and places of belonging on a global scale" (p. 243).

Dispensing, then, with national geopolitical units of place as its central pivot, Caribbean Journeys foregrounds instead those "pathways of interpersonal relations" (p. 10) that facilitate and sustain migration and that in turn take on new meaning through the experience of journeying. For Olwig—and, she claims, for her informants—it is the tropes and the social reality of "family," kin networks, and of "home" rather than communities or nation-state homelands or destination that provide meaningful structure for migrants. Even though "family" and "home" mean very different things in each of the kin networks and to the individuals interviewed for the study, yet in their journeys her informants, Olwig claims, see themselves as shoring up old family homes or establishing new ones; through their migrations they live out or realize foundational family values and ideals; they...