Overview of Cultural Anthropology

The country that I chose to conduct a culture analysis on is Jamaica. Jamaica is a third world country located in North America and the 3rd largest island in the Caribbean Sea. There is a 2.5 million population, which equally divided between urban and rural areas. The country runs approximately 146 miles long and varies between 21- 52 miles wide. The climate is tropical and its main tourist attraction is their beautiful beaches. The capital of Jamaica is Kingston, which has a population of more than 645,000. Kingston is the chief port of Jamaica and is along the southeastern coast of the island. It is covered by the “Blue Mountains”, which is thickly covered which tree ferns. The Blue Mountains experiences an average of 200 inches of rain annually, resulting in topsoil erosion and an abundance of streams. Peasants nurture coffee, usually grown on large plantations, in the valleys of the mountains. It is amongst the most expensive coffees in the world and is exported mainly to Japan.

Slavery represents an important part of Jamaican history and the cultivated dominant atmosphere. For one, plantations highly depended on slave labor to maximize profit margins. Between 1655 and 1808 one million slaves were forcefully brought to Jamaica (Waters, 1985: 21-23). Persaud (2001: 72) suggests, “the plantation system, the totality of institutional arrangements surrounding the production and marketing of plantation crops, has seriously affected society in Jamaica”. In other words, the slave mode of production was a crucial factor in the establishment of Jamaica’s structural society. “Jamaica’s class structure today reflects its history as a colonial plantation society and its beginnings of industrial development

Ethnography tells about a culture and the members that comprise this culture. A definition is the scientific description of the customs and individual people of a culture. The process of doing this assignment allowed me to explore another aspect of a cultural group. I was able to learn extensively about interactions between individuals and how see them as a culture. The group that comprises my ethnography is a cultural group very common to Utah. The culture I focused on was the LDS culture, to be more specific I studied a sub-culture of this group. My subculture was a group of 12 year old adolescents that are a Sunday school class in this culture.

In an article written in the Jamaica Observer, Haughton (2017) describes the state of Jamaica as an under-developed child who continues to depend on its parents for approval. “For many years colonialism milked Jamaica and other Caribbean countries by imposing a false identity on our people, diminishing resources that affected growth and development (Haughton, 2017).

What is anthropology? This is a question that can be answered in numerous ways, but we are going to define it as simple as possible. If we break the word down into its two components it means the study of human beings. “Anthropo” means human beings or human kind and “logy” or “logia” is Greek for the study or knowledge of something. When we put it all together, it is the study of human beings which can be very broad. Anthropology can be broken down into four subfields: physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology.

In society today, the discipline of anthropology has made a tremendous shift from the practices it employed years ago. Anthropologists of today have a very different focus from their predecessors, who would focus on relating problems of distant peoples to the Western world. In more modern times, their goal has become much more local, in focusing on human problems and issues within the societies they live.

The Jamaican economy in 1970 was 800 million dollars in debt and by the time of the year 2000 the debt had reached an alarming 7 billion dollars. In order to service its accumulated debts Jamaica set up Exporting Processing Zones or EPZ’s. The free zones created lots of employment to jump-start the economy. The free zones themselves were separate entities to Jamaica, similar to the US-owned cemetery for the WW2 soldiers in Normandy. In this way, the supplies needed for manufacturing never really enter Jamaica, thus allowing for cheap imports. The factories had their downsides though. Workers were only paid in Jamaican dollars about 30USD per week while some were paid that for two weeks. Every two weeks, money was taken out as taxes which angered the Jamaicans

After visiting the country of Jamaica this past summer, I realized how dissimilar some countries can be from the United States. Jamaica was not unlike the United States in a terrible way, but the disparities made me additionally interested in researching about the beautiful and culture-rich country of Jamaica. Even though the majority of facts about the history and culture of the United States and Jamaica are dissimilar, I was surprised to come across some similarities among these two countries.

James P. Spradley (1979) described the insider approach to understanding culture as "a quiet revolution" among the social sciences (p. iii). Cultural anthropologists, however, have long emphasized the importance of the ethnographic method, an approach to understanding a different culture through participation, observation, the use of key informants, and interviews. Cultural anthropologists have employed the ethnographic method in an attempt to surmount several formidable cultural questions: How can one understand another's culture? How can culture be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed? What aspects of a culture make it unique and which connect it to other cultures? If

The legacy of slavery is not to be measured simply by the millions slaughtered by slave hunters in Africa, thrown overboard on the Middle Passage, or beaten to death in Jamaica, but in the destruction of important lines of human development, in the triumph of the parasite over the producer (Maxwell n.d). The legacy of slavery is probably one of the hardest issues in world history upon which to find agreement (Casciani 2007). Furthermore, the legacy of slavery has appeared large over Jamaican culture in the subsequent history of Jamaica. The people of Jamaica have a fierce nationalism and identify strongly with Africa, to an extent that world news in Jamaica often features more stories on African than the Americas (History of Jamaica 2015).

The music industry in Jamaica is one of the most influential in the world. Popular music genres such as reggae and dancehall was both originated in Jamaica. Likewise, rap and hip hop was stated by a Jamaican, called Kool Herc. Bob Marley is also a famous music artist from Jamaica. His music played an important role in many movements in Jamaica and all over the world. The most famous one is the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Dancing is also important in Jamaica. A famous proverb in Jamaica, is that “those who can’t dance, blame it on the music”. In all african countries, music and dancing is really normal and it’s like this in Jamaica too. It is normal to dance on the streets in public and have fun, while listening to music. By all means music and dancing is undoubtedly important for Jamaica and the culture is mostly based around

The island of Jamaica is very rich in culture and has many historic turnabouts throughout the years. The country has a rich and complex history including being the first country to have Arawak and Taino Indians settle there.

Jamaica is a land of diverse cultures. It has a number of different racial ethnic groups .The largest group however is the blacks or Africans so 'Jamaica’s culture' is predominantly black. Interwoven is also the European culture which these blacks learnt from their former white slaves masters. You will find Indians living in Jamaica also. Many Indians came to Jamaica as indentured servants and stayed, they too have an input in the Jamaica’s culture.

     Bananas are another industry that is suffering in Jamaica. American companies like Chiquita and Dole rely solely on developing countries for production of their product. Farmers have to deal with the competition of countries that are even less costly to the US, such as Columbia. Milk production was once very strong in Jamaica and has now dramatically declined due to taxes implemented on the country.

     Jamaica is a tropical island, located in the heart of the Caribbean Sea. Around the coastlines are beautiful beaches with crystal clear blue-green water. In some respects, this is the majority of what people know about Jamaica. In this orientation text you will better understand Jamaica’s history, the people who live there, the many different religions, geography, and governments that have ruled the land.