Suchergebnisse

Argues that whatever racial antipathies exist in Guyana today are not the same of those of the 1960s. The author reviews the 'racial violence' of the 1950s and 1960s. He concludes that the politics of that era was a complex process in which many elements were involved and not simply the outcome of racial antagonism or the reassertion of colonial hegemonic values.

3 sets of factors which are perceived as important to an understanding of the Guyana situation are examined: (1) the colonial history of the country & its present relation to the US; (2) the structure of the economy & the internal system of soc stratification; (3) the extent of cultural diff's, soc segregation, & pol'al polarization between diff groups. Guyana's pop of about 700,000 is over 51% of East Indian descent, 30% of African, 5% of Amerindian descent, 1% Portuguese, & 6% Chinese. The pol'al process reflects a soc structure in which the units are racially-based cultural segments. The system is dynamic inasmuch as there has been a continuous movement both geographically & in terms of occup'al mobility. Racial diff's lead to jealousies & conflict in various areas, eg, in the civil service, in the area of Ur unemployment. Pol'ly, 2 issues of nat'l policy have arisen which appear to align with the group interests of Africans & Indians respectively: (a) the question of Caribbean Federation; (b) the question of the relative emphasis to be placed on agriculture as opposed to industry in the nat'l development plan. Neither party has been able to face the truly formidable task of soc transformation that will be necessary if disastrous internal conflicts are to be avoided. The Caribbean Free Trade Area seems to be making some real progress, but this is not going to solve Guyana's internal problems. internal pot in Guyana have not been able to pass beyond the stage of factional conflict over office-holding on one hand & accommodation to the realities of internat'l power pot & econ structure on the other. Pol'al conflicts are aligned to racial diff's & activated by a sense of group identity but their cause & origin must be sought in the soc & econ structure & the external pol'al environment. M. Maxfield.

While the universality of the "nuclear family" has been disputed by a number of anthropological writers the problem hasa always been to specify what is meant by this term. Here it is suggested that there are three analytically separable ways of looking at the nuclear family; as a cultural construct of very general definitional significance; as a unitary system of normative emphasis in which the roles of husbandfather, wife-mother, son-brother and daughter-sister are combined into a solidary unit with its own peculiar normative stress; and as a group of co-resident kin. It is argued that while lower class Americans in general and lower class Afro-americans in particular, share the general cultural premises which make nuclear family relations an important configuration for the definition of kinship, and while they frequently are to be found living in nuclear family households, they do not share the middle-class normative emphasis upon a unitary and ideally independent nuclear family system.