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Drinkers is a multi-form text. Essays, poetry, and fiction present rural life in Trinidad. These texts are interspersed with analytic and exploratory sections on the ethnographic and fieldwork experience. Within a context which includes the West Indian sugar estate at its core, and the distant but very influential U.S.A. at the periphery, Stewart reveals villagers struggling with problems of individual identity, as well as with problems occasioned by the historical struggle between African, European, and Indian cultural forms.
"The stories that make up the body of the text are engrossing and charming at the same time; Stewart is obviously a talented writer of fiction, among the best of contemporary Caribbean writers who have produced a very rich semi-ethnographic corpus on cultural experience in their homelands. The special interest of Stewart's work for anthropologists is that he legitimates ethnographic fiction as a form of doing ethnography in a very persuasive and sophisticated way. He raises such issues himself with great elegance in his last chapter, and he appropriately places his work squarely in the context of the contemporary debate about the nature of the ethnography." — George E. Marcus, Rice University
"Drinkers is an innovative and creative piece of work that sets about to present those subjective cultural dimensions that guide action but are so difficult to establish and present through the usual ethnographic techniques. Stewart uses short stories to present these submerged cultural principles. He is an accomplished writer and the effort is a highly successful one. He is also a fine anthropologist sensitive to the unstated nuances of human behavior in a range of social conditions." — George C. Bond, Teachers College, Columbia University
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Hermeneutics and the Anthropology of Fiction
Robert A. Manners
Introduction
I. Post-Modern Ethnography and the Fictive ModeSmall Victories
II. Native and Anthropologist in the Field
Who's Speaking Here?
Shadows in the Moonlight
Who's Speaking Here?
After the Rain
In the Field
Bad Blood
At the Desk
The Community Center
From the Field
When Oya Dances
Who's Speaking Here?
I Witness
At the Desk
Afterword
Glossary of Trinidadian Terms
References