When over 900 followers of the Peoples Temple religious group committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and fear. Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as ...brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals that originally inspired Peoples Temple members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased so that we can better understand what was created—and destroyed—at Jonestown, and why.
Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archival research, and diaries and letters of those who died there, Maaga describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life. The book analyzes the historical and sociological factors that, Maaga finds, contributed to the mass suicide, such as growing criticism from the larger community and the influx of an upper-class, educated leadership that eventually became more concerned with the symbolic effects of the organization than with the daily lives of its members.
Hearing the Voices of Jonestown puts human faces on the events at Jonestown, confronting theoretical religious questions, such as how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and misguided ends.
Sam Durrant’s powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue ...to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud’s opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.
Colin Palmer, one of the foremost chroniclers of twentieth-century British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, here tells the story of British Guiana's struggle for independence. At the center of ...the story is Cheddi Jagan, who was the colony's first premier following the institution of universal adult suffrage in 1953.Informed by the first use of many British, U.S., and Guyanese archival sources, Palmer's work details Jagan's rise and fall, from his initial electoral victory in the spring of 1953 to the aftermath of the British-orchestrated coup d'etat that led to the suspension of the constitution and the removal of Jagan's independence-minded administration. Jagan's political odyssey continued--he was reelected to the premiership in 1957--but in 1964 he fell out of power again under pressure from Guianese, British, and U.S. officials suspicious of Marxist influences on the People's Progressive Party, founded in 1950 by Jagan and his activist wife, Janet Rosenberg. But Jagan's political life was not over--after decades in the opposition, he became Guyana's president in 1992.Subtly analyzing the actual role of Marxism in Caribbean anticolonial struggles and bringing the larger story of Caribbean colonialism into view, Palmer examines the often malevolent roles played by leaders at home and abroad and shows how violence, police corruption, political chicanery, racial politics, and poor leadership delayed Guyana's independence until 1966, scarring the body politic in the process.
Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana Bissessar, Ann Marie; Bissessar, Ann Marie; La Guerre, John Gaffar
2013., 2013, 2013-04-25
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In this book an attempt is made to probe more carefully the processes by which social and ethnic problems, as these pertain to Caribbean countries, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, are conveyed to the ...political arena and the mechanisms by which they determine critical outcomes. The authors of this book have accordingly distinguished between predisposing factors and what are described as triggering mechanisms. The factors that trigger dramatic changes will differ between Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. In short, while in some respects these societies are similar, in others, there are dramatic differences in their respective histories and political developments. This study begins with a survey of the literature on race relations and their connections with politics; it then proceeds to examine the context for the insertion of the two major groups into these societies, the emergence of ethnic groups, and their relationships with political organizations. The nature and politics of the leaders are then analyzed along with the political structures with a view to identifying what factors were responsible for the differing political experiences of both countries.
Compelling and evocative, Of Passionate Curves and Desirable Cadences reveals the vital cultural interconnections at the heart of a rain-forest Amerindian society. The Waiwai, who live in the remote ...interior of Guyana and in neighboring Brazil, follow a customary subsistence lifestyle built around swidden agriculture and hunting.   How do the Waiwai experience and think about themselves and their place in the so-called modern world around them? The anthropologist George Mentore draws on years of living with the Waiwai, a compelling theoretical perspective grounded in ethnographic subjectivity, and his own Guyanese heritage to depict the social and cultural world of the Waiwai. Mentore describes the relationship between the Waiwai cultural construction of the body, settlement, houses, fields, wildlife, power, knowledge, and gift giving in a variety of contexts and roles. This web of relationships, as well as the various spaces discovered and illuminated between Mentore's social being and theirs, point to a complex organization of culture that is distinctively Waiwai. When considering the Waiwai people’s “plaited” design of passion and intimacy in the way it relates to humans, plants, and animals, Mentore promises the reader that through his text you will encounter a community of truth that tames logic and desire, where well being, beauty, morality, and care encircle the transcendent self.
This study explores the political participation levels of two major ethnic groups in Guyana, Indians and Africans. It is the first book on Guyana to empirically analyze to what extent the Guyanese ...society is divided along ethnic lines which feed into the political system, fostering the marginalization of the un/under-represented. Historical and contemporary data on education, health and allocation of public services are used.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced sudden transformation in many sectors of the global community, turning the world upside down. Everything has been impacted, not excluding the education sector, which ...has experienced some unforeseen changes in many parts of the world. The sudden transition to online pedagogy as a result of COVID-19 in developing countries has exposed some inequalities and challenges, as well as benefits. These challenges and inequalities have now become the new realities in the educational sector of developing countries. Suggestions are provided here so that the challenges presented by the new approach can be mitigated while we come to terms with the disruptions introduced by COVID-19 to our education sector.
The economy has experienced seven consecutive years of robust growth, buoyed by high commodity prices, foreign direct investment and expansion of private sector credit. As part of a strategy to ...sustain growth, reduce poverty and curtail dependence on imported oil, the authorities are pursuing the Amaila Falls Hydro-electric Project (AFHP), entailing investment of about 30 percent of GDP. However, steps by Parliament that delayed important approvals led the private sector partner to withdraw, which could delay the project while additional financing is sought. Meanwhile, public debt remains high-around 60 percent of GDP-limiting the room to finance inclusive growth.
Ocean color remote sensing has been shown to be a useful tool to map turbidity (T) and suspended particulate matter (SPM) concentration in turbid coastal waters. Different algorithms to retrieve T ...and/or SPM from water reflectance already exist, however there are important questions as to whether these algorithms need to be calibrated specifically for different regions. In the present work the potential generality of a semi-empirical single band turbidity retrieval algorithm using the near infrared (NIR) band at 859nm in highly turbid waters is assessed. For completeness the use of 645nm in medium to low turbidity waters is also proposed. Radiative transfer simulations and in situ measurements from various European and South American coastal and shallow estuarine environments characterized by high concentrations of suspended sediments are analyzed. Reflectance and turbidity measurements were performed in the southern North Sea (SNS) and French Guyana (FG) coastal waters, and Scheldt (SC), Gironde (GIR) and Río de la Plata (RdP) estuaries. Simulations showed that uncertainty for turbidity estimation associated with different particle types and bidirectional effects is typically less than 6%. When applied to field data from the five different sites, the semi-analytical algorithm performed well: turbidity estimates were within 12% and 22% of in situ values. A good performance was also found when the entire database was analyzed (n=106) with a mean relative error of 13.7% and bias of 4.8%. The good performance of the algorithm for all these regions, despite differences in sediment characteristics, and the results of the radiative transfer simulations suggest the global applicability of the algorithm to map turbidity up to 1000FNU. Consequently regional algorithms to retrieve SPM concentration from reflectance can be designed by combining this global algorithm to retrieve T from water reflectance with a regional relationship to convert T to SPM. This has the very practical advantage that the measurements needed to calibrate the latter T/SPM conversion for any new region are much easier and cheaper than in situ reflectance measurements.
•Generality of a single-band turbidity algorithm from water reflectance is analyzed•A sensitivity analysis and algorithm's uncertainties are calculated•A good performance of the algorithm in different regions using field data is found•Algorithm's global applicability to map turbidity between 1–1000FNU is suggested•Advantage of global T algorithm to estimate SPM is discussed
Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by Wapishana people in Guyana,Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability ...and resilience in indigenous resource use. Developing an original framework for holistic analysis, it demonstrates that flexible interplay among multiple modes of environmental understanding and decision-making allows the Wapishana to navigate socio-ecological complexity successfully in ways that reconcile short-term material needs with long-term maintenance and enhancement of the resource base.
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