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Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica 1944-2007. Amanda Sives. Kingston: Ian Randle. 2010. xxix + 232 pp. (Paper US$ 22.95)
Douglas Midgett
Department of Anthropology
University of Iowa
Iowa City IA 52242, U.S.A.
In this book Amanda Sives examines the nature of electoral violence in Jamaica from the nation's first popular election under universal adult suffrage in 1944 until 2007. This follows from her 1995 Ph.D. dissertation, and a number of follow-up articles. Although she has extended the time frame from that of the thesis, there is little post-1995 material, save for brief examination of the election in 2007. Thus, although she has made regular return visits to Jamaica since the mid-1990s, we can only guess at the changes that have transpired relative to the relationship between partisan politics and violence since that time.
The introduction examines two approaches to the study of partisan political violence in Jamaica. The first, advanced by Carl Stone and written mostly during the first Michael Manley regime (1972-1980), focuses on clientelist politics that developed during the first decades of Jamaican popular politics, with an escalating violent component. The second, authored by Obika Gray, examines fundamental cultural orientations among Jamaican males, referred to as "badness-honour." Although Sives indicates that she will employ these two approaches to "situate my own work" (p. xv), further mention of Gray's analysis disappears after she dismisses it as "an unwieldy tool ... [that] encompasses too broad a range of resistance" (p. xix). This dismissal, I suggest, deprives Sives of a...