Caribbean journeys : an ethnography of migration and home in three family networks /

Olwig (Univ. of Copenhagen) offers a fine study of the role of family networks in migration. While the book is historically and theoretically well informed, at its core there is a close-grained, almost intimate understanding of how individuals and families construct their multilocal lives while migrating from--and often returning to--several Caribbean locales: a town in Jamaica, a village in Nevis, and a French- and Creole-speaking rural community in Dominica. Olwig views each family from a multigenerational perspective; she acknowledges the burdens of the past but also the debt owed to older generations in a way that gives narrative drive to this otherwise sober analysis. She excels at establishing constitutive contradictions, such as the fact that migrants often attribute their values, strength, and resilience to small communities, which they nevertheless leave. The author draws important conceptual conclusions about the various forms of social mobility made possible by transnational migration, always based on closely observed accounts of the multidirectional journeys of these Caribbean families. Olwig is skeptical and, on a few occasions, dismissive about some aspects of emergent theories of dispersion, diaspora, and transnational migration, yet she makes an important contribution to them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All college and university collections in migration studies. K. Tololyan Wesleyan University