Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands.

Abstract

If, as many cultural critics have asserted, world is becoming more like Caribbean, then task of charting what we mean by the is an urgent one. This careful study of British Virgin Islands (BVI) calls attention to ways in which ideas about nature and choice have come to justify a social order in which half population is deemed not to belong and is denied legal rights.The BVI, one of Britain's few remaining colonial possessions, has become an important destination point for Caribbean migrants and a center for international financial services. Bill Maurer traces how BVI came to be defined, legally and popularly, as a territorial entity, and how BVIslanders came to define themselves as a sharing a culture. He argues that law has been central to construction of ethnic, racial, and cultural differences that create boundaries between peoples and places and that facilitate exploitation of labor, exclusion of people from political process, and globalization of capital.Recharting will be important reading for anthropologist, legal scholars, and historians of colonial discourse.Bill Maurer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Irvine.