Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on idiom
- 1 The coming of the Earth People
- 2 A certain degree of instability
- 3 Madness, vice and tabanka: popular knowledge of psychopathology in Trinidad
- 4 Mother Earth and the psychiatrists
- 5 Putting Out The Life
- 6 Your ancestor is you: Africa in a new world
- 7 Nature and the millennium
- 8 Incest: the naked earth
- 9 The Beginning Of The End: everyday life in the valley
- 10 Genesis of meaning, limits of mimesis
- APPENDICES
- Glossary
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
5 - Putting Out The Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- A note on idiom
- 1 The coming of the Earth People
- 2 A certain degree of instability
- 3 Madness, vice and tabanka: popular knowledge of psychopathology in Trinidad
- 4 Mother Earth and the psychiatrists
- 5 Putting Out The Life
- 6 Your ancestor is you: Africa in a new world
- 7 Nature and the millennium
- 8 Incest: the naked earth
- 9 The Beginning Of The End: everyday life in the valley
- 10 Genesis of meaning, limits of mimesis
- APPENDICES
- Glossary
- Notes
- List of references
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Summary
Everything has its meaning, its sign, everything has its spirit.
Mother EarthThis chapter draws together some of Mother Earth's ideas in the form of a conventionalised cosmogony: her words but my ordering of paragraphs.
In the Beginning
In the Beginning was Nothing. Nothing was Life. Nothing formed herself into the elements. The elements resolve itself as Life. So Life formed herself: the Fire, the Water, the Earth, Dirt, Slime and Salt, and revolving herself, with the womb in the middle – the Moon. And there were all the planets for and against The Mother inside her … A Son she bring forth. The Son was inside the Womb – Death. So then Life and Death together once, not in the form as it is now but, as the people say, ‘in the spirit’. Death revolving itself in the womb, in the Earth, Slime and Salt, Fire and Water. Well, she give him his own planet (everything carry its own planet by the name) so the Son carry his planet which is the planet Sun which we have up there, covered over with heat.
The Interference
He left his planet. The reason for the heat around the planet is by him leaving his planet and enter the Earth. He wanted to have life, to bring forth like The Mother so he enter … When he entered, pain entered the Earth. So he enter the Earth and the Earth change. It keep changing, changing until she put out flesh. And the first Flesh on the Earth were mothers which we were in a form.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pathology and IdentityThe Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad, pp. 79 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993