In 1975, Jeanette Baptist burned all of her belongings in front of her family,
had a prophetic vision that the End was near, and went naked into what she
called Hell Valley, on Trinidad's remote northeast coast. Throughout 1981,
anthropologist and psychiatrist Roland Littlewood paid her visits. This sensitive
and unusual ethnography is the product of Littlewood's dialogues
with Baptist, who re-named herself Mother Earth. It is, first, a powerful
statement of Mother Earth's cosmology, and that of the young, underclass,
urban men who came to join her in the bush intermittently from the founding
of her settlement until her death in 1983. Second, it is a richly textured
story about the dynamic interweaving of diverse cultural practices in the
contemporary Caribbean. Third, it is an exercise in reconciling bio-psychological
explanation with ethnography. Here is where it founders, as Littlewood
freely admits, but not without posing unsettling questions.