(Post)kolonialne wytwarzanie Jamajki
(Post)Colonial Making of Jamaica

Ethnography of Social Mobility

Author(s): Łukasz Kaczmarek
Subject(s): History, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Cultural history, Ethnohistory, Local History / Microhistory, Social history, Theology and Religion, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Culture and social structure
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: social anthropology; political anthropology; social mobility; socio-economical status; racism; classism; multisited ethnography; anthropology of Jamaica
Summary/Abstract: The book by anthropologist Lukasz Kaczmarek includes reflections from his multi-site ethnographic research on the transformations of a post-colonial society in a state so vital to understanding the modern world. Jamaican society has come a long way from a numerically dominant servile population of enslaved and disenfranchised people subordinated to colonial rule through to citizens of a country doomed to peripheralization within the global economy. Kaczmarek presents the ethno-historical aspects of the formation of the racist-classist domination of a group of Europeans over the majority shaped by the economic use of people, the exploitation and preservation of their subordinate status and the exploitation of global inequalities. Using Jamaican urban spaces and tourism as an example, he presents the consequences of colonial neglect of the island's social and economic development, and maintaining the majority of its inhabitants in the position of ‘Others’, which has resulted in their rejecting an important part of the "colonial legacy" and their aspirations to create their own identity. The author devotes the final chapters to discussing the practical consequences of the continuation of ethno-racial and class statuses rooted in colonial and nationalist hierarchies, which do not fit the description of societies in the modern world, but are cynically resuscitated and utilized in order to legitimize the exploitation and discrimination of arbitrarily selected groups.

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