During the summers of 1959 and 1961 the author collected data on family life in four of the seven villages which together form the Long Bay Cays settlement district in the southernmost part of Andros Island in the Bahamas. His book is a welcome addition to the literature on the Caribbean family. Chapters deal with the historical and geographical setting; the patterns of courtship, marriage, and childbirth; the mating system; the household; and the interpersonal relationships. In these Otterbein presents us well-organized data.
As the author correctly observes in his conclusion, the two-choice mating system among the inhabitants of Long Bay Cays (i.e., a system characterized by marriage and extra-residential unions but not consensual unions) is also to be found in a number of other small Caribbean islands. One of these is Carriacou, studied by M. G. Smith in West Indian Family Structure (Reviewed in HAHR, August 1964). These island communities have in common their short distance to either the United States or a large West Indian island. Many of the men, therefore, find work at sea or as migratory wage laborers. “The money they earn is used primarily to build homes in preparation for marriage” (p. 139); and the surplus of women accounts for the high incidence of extra-residential mating.
To this reviewer it certainly seems plausible that economic and geographical factors determine to some extent the prevailing mating patterns of a community. Sex ratios undoubtedly have statistical and functional relation to the frequency of extra-residential mating. However, the distinct preference of marriage over consensual union in all these small communities studied (cf. p. 138) can hardly be explained out of demographic, economic, or geographic necessity. At most, the relative prosperity (at least on Andros Island) can be said to make ritual marriage easier, but determinism is out of the question. Rather would one be tempted to see in the smallness of these communities a common feature which makes their preference for legal marriages understandable.
The “Christian” value system with regard to marriage might have been more intensively inculcated through the social control of a well-established church organization and through a more intensive pattern of face-to-face relations with the European population group in the past, than was the case in certain parts of the larger Caribbean societies. The admissive attitude towards “outside children” would not be at all incompatible with this hypothesis, which I feel is strengthened by Otterbein’s description of the formalities of courtship and marriage. These could have been taken out of a nineteenth-century European rural community study (including the waltzes and quadrilles danced). Another phenomenon strengthening this hypothesis is the virtual absence of certain “African” beliefs (e.g., the navel string as an object of obeah and the attitude towards twins) which the author observes (p. 64).
