Few modern innovations have spread quite so quickly as the cell phone. This technology has transformed communication throughout the world. Mobile telecommunications have had a dramatic effect in many regions, but perhaps nowhere more than for low-income populations in countries such as Jamaica, where in the last few years many people have moved from no phone to cell phone. This book reveals the central role of communication in helping low-income households cope with poverty. The book traces the impact of the cell phone from personal issues of loneliness and depression to the global concerns of the modern economy and the transnational family. As the technology of social networking, the cell phone has become central to establishing and maintaining relationships in areas from religion to love. The Cell Phone presents the first detailed ethnography of the impact of this new technology through the exploration of the cell phone's role in everyday lives.

In August 1962, the island nation of Jamaica achieved independence from Great Britain. In this provocative social and political history of the first decade of independence, Obika Gray explores the impact of radical social movements on political change in Jamaica during a turbulent formative era. Led by a minority elite and a middle class of mixed racial origins, two parties, each with its associated workers' union, emerged to dominate the postcolonial political scene. Gray argues that party leaders, representing the dominant social class, felt vulnerable to attack and resorted to dictatorial measures to consolidate their power. These measures, domestic social crises, and the worldwide rise of Black Power and other Third World ideologies provoked persistent challenges to the established parties' political and moral authority. With students, radical intellectuals, and the militant urban poor in the vanguard, the protest movement took many forms. Rastafarian religious symbolism, rebel youth's cultural innovations, efforts to organize independent labor unions, and the intelligentsia's varied attempts to use mass media to reach broader audiences--all influenced the course of political events in this period. Grounding his tale in relevant theory, Gray persuasively contends that, despite its narrow social and geographical base of support, this urban protest movement succeeded in moving the major parties toward broader and more progressive agendas.

Michaeline A. Crichlow extends the contemporary critique of development projects by examining the political and discursive relationship of the state to the land-based working people, or 'smallholders, ' in modern Jamaica. The first book of its kind, Negotiating Caribbean Freedom does for Jamaican historiography and sociology what Akhil Gupta's PostColonial Developments did for studies of India. Michaeline A. Crichlow gives us an incredibly nuanced discussion of how development dominates the lives of the subsistance peasantry, not through force, but through the instrumentalization of social relationships that were once ends in themselves. For example, what were once effective agricultural practices--embedded in the every day lives of smallholders all over the island--have, in the interest of serving international captial, been bureaucratized to the point that they are untenable to support the livelihoods of smallholders. Not content to measure the success or failure of development to deliver on its promises, she discloses both the continuities and differences between development projects of very different political regimes and helps to establish why smallholders support development projects even when those projects fail to address their needs.

Although negative conditions exist, it appears that disabled children are not particularly stigmatized at the household level. Nevertheless, societal stigmatization and apathy do exist. As a result, disabled children are not being prepared to fully integrate into Jamaican society. 2. There is a range of variation of beliefs and behaviors with regard to disability and rehabilitation. The concept of intracultural diversity is supported. 3. This population has adapted their cultural belief systems and actual behaviors to match their material realities. That is, it would appear that people who have a disability, and their caretakers, have demonstrated "contextual accommodation." 4. Community based rehabilitation programs, based on the primary health care and community participation principles enumerated by the WHO are theoretically sound and practically attainable in Jamaica.