Practicing Anthropology on the Periphery: A Caribbean Instance, Michael O'Neal

After beginning my professional career as a manager in a family business in the Virgin Islands, I eventually “detoured” to pursue graduate studies in anthropology, ultimately earning the Ph.D. in 1983 with a dissertation on the political economy of development of the BVI, and returning to the business immediately thereafter. Over the course of my career in the BVI, I have variously and often simultaneously worn the hats of business executive, conservation consultant, NGO chair, community college president, and scholar, attempting, whenever appropriate, to apply an anthropological perspective to these undertakings in an informed and judicious manner, in settings far removed from the academic and professional centers of gravity of anthropology. The concept of Caribbean “occupational multiplicity”, involving an individual’s “simultaneous or sequential engagement in a number of economic activities” is well known, following the work of Lambros Comitas (1973) and others. Thus, by way of illustration, “politicians who are also historians or writers, the fisherman who keeps a rum-shop storefront that also rents video tapes, successful Cambridge-educated medical doctors who also keep kitchen gardens and raise pigs, are all well known and prized examples of occupational multiplicity in the Caribbean” (Freeman 2005: 5). It is within the context of this trope of occupational multiplicity and the wearing of many hats, then, that I seek to locate my reflections on practicing anthropology on the “periphery”, itself a multivalent term, referring, as it does in this instance, to both geographic and professional location, as well as political economy.