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Dominican Cultures: The Making of a Caribbean Society. Edited by Bernardo Vega and translated by Christine Ayorinde. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-55876-435-4. 259 pp. $26.95 paper.
The book Dominican Cultures: The Making of a Caribbean Society is an English translation of the 1981 Ensayos sobre Cultura Dominicana, a collection of lectures presented from 1977 to 1981 at the Museo del Hombre Dominicano in Santo Domingo. As mentioned in the preface to Dominican Cultures, the original book, Ensayos, is widely used as a standard reference for cultural studies in the Dominican Republic. Bernardo Vega, the director of the Museo del Hombre Dominicano and editor of the original coUection of essays, explains the impetus for Dominican Cultures this way: "Today, a sizeable proportion of the population of the Dominican Republic lives outside the country, particularly in North America. For this reason, it is time to sponsor an English edition which wiU undoubtedly enable people in the Dominican Republic to better understand both their own culture and that of their forebears" (vii). To this end, Dominican Cultures accomplishes Vega's larger goal of increasing the amount of information available in English on Dominican cultural studies. However, as the publisher's note points out, Dominican Cultures reflects the same documentation inadequacies that are present in the original Ensayos. "Like the book from which it is translated, it reproduces the lectures as closely as possible. Because they were not necessarily accompanied by full documentation when they were presented, the documentation in this edition is, in some places, inevitably inconsistent or even missing" (ix). The translation itself from Spanish into English also suffers from a certain awkwardness in places that readers may stumble through.
Dominican Cultures is divided into seven chapters: "The Indigenous Inheritance in Dominican Culture" by Bernardo Vega; "Commentary on 'The Indigenous Inheritance in Dominican Culture'" by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo; "The Spanish Inheritance in Dominican Culture" by Carlos Dobral; "The African Inheritance in Dominican Culture" by Carlos Esteban Deive; "The Hato and the Conuco: The Emergence of Creole Culture" by Rubén Silié; "Immigration in the Late Nineteenth and...