Fruitful Fictions, Partial Truths: New Dilemmas in Caribbean Research

Richard and Sally Price - How are anthropologists to react as the peoples they study increasingly commoditize their ethnicity in response to globalization? As veteran ethnographers of two very different societies in the Caribbean – rural Martinique and Maroons from the interior of Suriname, both of which are implicated in partial globalization – we have come to feel an ethical and epistemological discomfort trying to reconcile the ‘partial truths’ of our ethnographic work with the new identitarian stances we see being adopted.