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This chapter looks at the movement of non-resident Indians from India to the Caribbean after the Second World War. These Indians arrived in the Caribbean on their own volition. The focus will be on their movement to Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, mainly to compare and contrast their movement and settlement with that of former indentured Indians. Although they make up a significant population and have meaningful connections with the Indian diplomatic community in Guyana, Trinidad, and Suriname, they are not visible in these countries because they tend to blend with the majority Indian population. They are very noticeable in the predominantly African Caribbean islands. The chapter then traces the arrival of these recent migrants and assesses what they are doing in the Caribbean as well as their relationships with descendants of indentured Indians and the wider Caribbean ethnic community.

Ethnobotanical knowledge is often portrayed as being time and space contingent, transmitted as sacred oral text from generation to generation. It follows that knowledge of nature is necessarily the product of long-term, hands-on interaction with the environment. The botanical knowledge associated with immigrant communities, however, whose territorial occupancy is often measured in decades or centuries, has long been viewed as shallow and unworthy of ethnobotanical investigation. Immigrants, it is assumed, simply have not acquired sufficient understanding of the local flora to be of much scientific interest. This chapter explores the medicinal plant knowledge and skills of immigrants who have moved to or from tropical forested landscapes. Focusing on the African diaspora in the Americas, especially Suriname and Brazil, this chapter demonstrates that many immigrant groups have maintained profound connections with the healing traditions of their homelands. These “cultural resistance floras” are based in part on the hundreds of useful species that were disseminated throughout the tropical world purposely and by chance during the colonial era—the Columbian Exchange. And like most indigenous healing pharmacopoeias, the medicinal floras of the African diaspora consist largely of pan-tropical crops, weeds, and other products of human habitat modification.

Hoefte focuses on the religious and political schisms in the Javanese Muslim community in Suriname in the 1940s and 1950s. Though the overwhelming majority of Javanese were Muslim at this time, intra-religious strife split them into east and west worshipper groups. One group prayed, as in Java, facing westward; the other group faced east toward Mecca. This directional dispute, of course, was an embodiment of deeper disputes involving Javanese culture, politics, and whether the future of the Surinamese Javanese was in Suriname or in newly independent Indonesia. Central to Hoefte’s study is the effort of one group of Javanese to escape the discord in Suriname by relocating to Indonesia, where they built a new village named Tongar. Their lack of success there, however, closed off immigration to Indonesia as a viable option for other migrants who wished to escape the east-west conflict in Java. Since return to Indonesia was not feasible, Suriname became the only place where Javanese Muslims could advance. Hoefte argues that, to date, studies on twentieth-century Suriname have insufficiently recognized that, in the wake of the political emancipation of the Javanese after World War II, a gradual socio-cultural and socio-economic development followed, which gradually weakened conflicts between worshippers.

Past and present networks in the indigenous Caribbean, consisting of the Caribbean islands and adjoining mainland regions, provide a challenging opportunity for those who want to reconstruct them on the basis of mobile material culture. This chapter presents two case-studies in which the interactions of individuals and communities are modelled as networks using a social network analysis approach with data from (ethno-)archaeological research. One is based on ethnographic data from a small, indigenous village in western Suriname, while the other is based on past insular Caribbean networks, specifically from late pre- and early historic Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic). In the former, the intra-site network problems and opportunities faced by a contemporary indigenous leader and his community in Suriname are discussed, on the basis of the observed and accumulated exchange of objects within the boundaries of a single village. Subsequently, the case study building on insular Caribbean historical records continues with a discussion of various pre-colonial actors and their network roles, incorporating the influence of the role of various political specialists.

In which Maria Merian’s entomological studies and work in Suriname is discussed along with Mark Catesby’s travels in the Carolinas. The focus then shifts to Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, with details on White’s education, life, and correspondents. After this the chapter discusses Joseph Banks and James Cook’s circumnavigation of the world and the Bartrams’s work in America.

This chapter presents two affidavits submitted to the Inter-American Court. The first case was concerned with the negative consequences of Suriname’s refusal to recognize indigenous land rights, including the establishment of a nature reserve that become a de facto open-access zone on indigenous land. The second addressed problems associated with indigenous land tenure in Guyana under the Amerindian Act of 2006. Comparing the two cases allows the chapter to make several observations about the dynamics of short-term ethnographic research conducted for expert-witness reports. This includes the need to make affidavits legible to the three overlapping frames of the legal system, the communities seeking recognition of their rights, and anthropology. The chapter also considers the narrative choices in these affidavits, the political dilemmas of being an expert witness, and the compromises of short-term ethnography.

This chapter opens with a summary of Dutch decolonization policies in the Caribbean, followed by an analysis of the state of affairs in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles in the late 1960s, including the position of the Afro-Caribbean population in both countries. It then analyses the dramatic events of the May 1969 revolt in Curaçao, assessing the long-term implications of the uprising for the constitutional development of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and for Afro-Caribbean empowerment in the former Dutch colonies. While ideas of Afro-Caribbean liberation contributed both to the 1969 revolt and to the later independence of Suriname in 1975, these events do not conform to a simple heroic narrative of emancipatory Black Power in the Dutch Caribbean.

This chapter illustrates Jean-Francois's enthusiasm for the Suriname mission. When he appeared before Zinzendorf and a board that wished to test his commitment and aptitude for the mission, he declared his willingness to work to his death for the Savior in Suriname, or until called to serve elsewhere. He viewed the Gemeine in Marienborn as his “spiritual mother”, whom he would obey as a child obeys its own mother. Regarding his new wife, he announced in the above quotation that he was devoted to her but that he would place the needs of the mission above hers. The Moravian leadership was so impressed with his candor and devotion that they recorded his responses to their questions and published them. Maria Barbara did not share her husband's enthusiasm for the mission, nor did she care for his public declaration that he would subordinate her needs to it.

This chapter presents Reynier's intentions of pursuing a mission among the Africans and Indians in Suriname. It was also what the Gemeine in Marienborn wanted them to do, as the Herrnhaag cantata had made clear. In Paramaribo, free blacks working in crafts and trades and as seamstresses and slaves aroused his interests for the mission. His deceptive interview with the governor, together with the authorities' preoccupation with the Moravian spiritual threat to the white colonial population (blanken), gave Reynier the opportunity he sought. Reynier planned to gain spiritual access to the slaves via his medical talents. The barbers and surgeons, whom he believed only pretended to be university-trained doctors, were most concerned with controlling who treated the blanken.

Richard Price and Sally Price present a selective literary history of Suriname by identifying tropes established in the early modern period which still have currency today and which constitute the ‘changing same’ of their title: the menacing jungle vs. the bountiful rainforest, the space of death, torture and heroic resistance vs. the idyllic plantation, and the multi-ethnic paradise vs. the contemporary narcocracy. After analyzing the particularly rich body of eighteenth-century prose (e.g. John Gabriel Stedman's 1790 Narrative) and artwork (including William Blake's engravings made for Stedman's book), they move on to the current struggle of Suriname's Maroons to protect their territorial rights by using their oral history and self-made maps as tools in their legal defense. They end with analysis and examples of Saamaka Maroon folktales, told at mortuary wakes. Throughout, emphasis is on local rather than European or other external voices.

Mimi Sheller's essay reminds readers that underlying the cultural geographies of the American Tropics there is a physical geography of mining and resource extraction which has aluminium at its very core. She depicts the relation between North America and the American Tropics as two inextricably linked faces to aluminium: the North Atlantic's dreams of mobility, speed and communication systems represent the gleaming side of modernity, while the harsher tropical reality of mining, labour exploitation, and environmental devastation represent the dark side of modernisation. Rather than a literary history, Sheller here offers a visual analysis of graphic illustrations that drew on literary tropes of the tropics, from botanical collection to ethnological depictions of racial types, music, and dance. Through her analysis of the transnational cultural geographies of the American tropics represented in these advertising images, Sheller also shows how the images testified to a cultural vitality and to a potentially threatening ‘mobility’. Despite the damage done to people and environment by bauxite mining, Caribbean countries remain active in planning for the expansion of aluminium production, attesting to the ongoing power of world economic processes to shape the region.

Leprosy became a visible problem among African slaves in Suriname in the 1750s, and seemed to threaten to return to Europe. This chapter argues that, driven by the needs and interest of Surinamese slave society and economy, Dutch colonial medicine framed the disease with negative connotations: originating among slaves in Africa, caused by unhealthy living conditions, and related to disreputable sexual morals - a danger to European dominance. The sufferers of the disease who threatened this dominance had a supposedly inferior racial and/or social status. By the end of the century, the solution was to compulsorily segregate and isolate them, and leave them to their fate. Leprosy management became an important aspect of slave labour management in the colony.

The exclusion of leprosy sufferers in Suriname began to resemble a ‘Great Confinement’ in the period from 1830 and 1860. Close to one of every one hundred inhabitants of the colony was condemned or suspected of having leprosy or elephantiasis, confined to the Batavia leprosy asylum, or segregated at home or elsewhere. The leprosy asylum did not function in the first place as a medical establishment, but rather as an instance of colonial order. Confinement policies were intense, especially in the period from 1830 to 1855, but the degree of effectiveness or the thoroughness of the segregation of all leprosy and elephantiasis sufferers remained unclear. The chapter argues that it was not the difficulty of enforcing the policy of segregation or doubts about its effectiveness, but the approaching abolition of slavery that put an end to the ‘Great Confinement’.

The Batavia leprosy asylum served to segregate the poor and the slaves among the Surinamese leprosy sufferers. Here the colonial government entered into a working relationship with the Catholic Church, in which the church had an essential role in maintaining some kind of moral and social order in the asylum. The Church was also allowed to use the asylum as an important recruiting ground for new converts. In the asylum, Catholic priests attempted to establish a ‘Christian leper identity’ on the sufferers, who had to shed their former heathen cultural identity to receive the care of Catholic compassion. But not all of the sufferers went along with the establishment of this new identity: Batavia was a place with its own infra-politics of non-compliance and contestation that was not so much evident in open resistance as in a cherishing of autonomy in everyday life.

This chapter examines Dutch debates about leprosy between 1863 and 1890. The debates took place when the threat of a ‘return’ of leprosy to the Netherlands appeared to materialise. While Dutch policy makers and doctors had to call upon medical expertise from Suriname, at the same time European medicine questioned the validity of a contagionist theory for leprosy. In the Dutch East Indies, with much less direct Dutch control over the population, the hereditarian view of leprosy was embraced. However, in the Dutch West Indies, the international shift in medical thought towards a hereditarian rather than a contagionist view of leprosy did not affect the principle of segregation, that remained in place after the abolition of slavery in 1863, and during the transformation of society because of the immigration of indentured labourers from British India and Java. The chapter argues that developments around leprosy in Suriname remained autonomous and were not directed from the Netherlands.

Chapter 8 makes the case that partial independence has significant economic and security advantages over full independence. In particular the chapter places special emphasis on comparisons between PITs and sovereign states that are as similar as possible. Accordingly, the chapter makes use of simple matching, regression analysis, modern matching, and case studies to examine the economic and security performance of PITs as compared to fully independent states. Distinct from the views of some scholars of international relations and historic nationalists, the chapter shows that in region after region throughout the world PITs tend to be far wealthier and secure than their fully independent counterparts.