Crab Antics: A Caribbean Study of the Conflict Between Reputation and Respectability

Crab Antics: A Caribbean Study of the Conflict Between Reputation and Respectability by Wilson, Peter J.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780881338492.

On Providencia, a tiny island in the southwest Caribbean, the metaphor of "crab antics" is commonly used to illustrate the dynamics of social life. For Peter Wilson, who spent over a year on the island, crab antics became a key image in his attempt to identify and analyze the standards by which people judge each others worth, and to explain how values of social differentiation provide a basis for social order. His findings and insights are presented in this vivid and readable study filled with the lives and language of the Providencians. Wilson examines Caribbean social life as a totality and in its own terms. In doing so, he describes a major dimension of Caribbean society that has been ignored in the literature: the pattern of values based on respectability, the drive toward stratification, reputation, the drive toward equality, and the dialectical relation between them. Wilsons other important and original contribution is his treatment of the mens groups that function as the psychological and political counterpart of the matrifocal household. Though primarily intended to offer a description and interpretation of the social life of Providencia, Crab Antics raises issues of critical importance to general anthropological theory.