Recently, there has been an upsurge in the critical attention directed toward the area studies research paradigms that were institutionalized after World War II. This upsurge comes at a time when anthropologists are also developing increasingly sophisticated accounts of the intersections of global and local processes. Yet there has been less engaged consideration of the agendas propelling global studies over area studies curricula. In this essay, we argue that an analysis of the Caribbean and Caribbeanist anthropology allows us to trace the global in the local, thus illustrating the benefits of local area analyses for understanding global dynamics. We draw on theoretical assertions regarding global-local interactions in order to assess the relation of anthropology to Caribbean studies and to explore the implications of analytical trajectories and theoretical developments within Caribbeanist anthropology for social and cultural processes on a global level. [

In the 1950s, Sidney Mintz carried out a short study of Caribbean settlements known as free villages. These communities were designed by Baptists as postemancipation social and economic living spaces for formerly enslaved Afro‐descendant peoples. Mintz was ultimately interested in establishing a village typology, describing how the church shaped villagers’ social and moral lives and gauging the communities’ capacity as a site of Afro‐Caribbean peasant resistance to plantations. This work influenced later studies of creolization, land, and the peasantry in free villages, as well as inquiries into the contemporary political‐economic and historical context of Afro‐Caribbean villages generally. Mintz's analysis can also be helpful for thinking through questions about social processes of rural place‐making and investments in freedom among people of African descent. [peasantries, land, place, community, freedom, Sidney Mintz, Caribbean]

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