Critical studies of human rights have hit an impasse. On the one hand, the relativist critique of rights is caught in the horns of the dilemmas that have trapped relativism more generally. When relativists declare that rights are not part of a particular cultural world, or that rights can do harm by commodifying relations or things that were once integral to people's lifeways, relativists re-institute cultures as the kind of definable, objectifiable entities that their critique of rights as objectifying "culture" sought to challenge. When relativists seek to discover "local" or "indigenous" conceptions of rights, or to find a least common denominator shared by all the world's cultures that will ground a new conception of rights (such as the lex talionis, or the eye-for-an-eye conception of justice),' they undermine their own claims of cultural incommensurability.2

This volume brings together the work of fourteen scholars of West Indian religious beliefs and practices. It will be a handy guide for future research, especially since the chapters, taken together, usefully summarize the literature to date on religion in the Caribbean and in Caribbean diasporic communities. The editor is to be commended for providing a sense of coherence to the very disparate case studies presented here. The analytical focus of the book is the formation of West Indian religiosity in the diaspora- and, indeed, as Aisha Khan puts it forcefully in her contribution, of the very idea of religion itself, constructed as a cultural and an analytical domain separate from other domains of social life. Refusing to view Caribbean religion as either made up of timeless traditions or as cut from whole cloth, and resisting temptations to see diaspora as a unidirectional flow from the Caribbean to immigrant communities in North America or to view cultural hegemony as a process emanating from North America southwards, the volume's contributors see diaspora itself destabilizing the traditional/modern dichotomy. Several contributors reveal the utter embeddedness of rational secularism and modernity, with their narratives of progress and development, in dominant Western religious cosmologies, and Caribbean religions' implicatedness in the constitution of specifically West Indian modernities at home and abroad.

New research on Caribbean tourism solidly locates it within the regional shift from "incentive-induced exports" like bananas to "service-based exports" like data processing, offshore finance, and novel forms of mass tourism (Mullings 2004:294; Duval 2004). Earlier studies may have made mention of the similarities between plantation economies and tourism development, but new models like the all-inclusive resort demonstrate a near identity of form and structure with plantation systems: foreign dominance over ownership and profit leaves little multiplier effect for the Caribbean islands playing host to enclaved resorts. Agricultural exports have been in free fall since the end of preferential trade protocols, and export manufacturing after the North American Free Trade Agreement is in steep decline. If new service economies seemed to offer a solution to economic and social disorder, the reaction to the events of September 11, 2001 demonstrated the fragility of service-based exports and, in particular, of new kinds of tourism. It took four years for international tourism to rebound to pre-9/ 11 levels; 1 with the perceived threat of SARS and avian flu, as well as the Iraq war and the weak U.S. dollar, official projections of the industry's near future are "cautiously optimistic."

This exciting volume fills gaps large and small and points to directions for future research. I emphasize one such direction here - the connection between liberal ideology, free trade, and new forms of exclusion - which may become more important, with the rise of regional free trade agreements that leave out the Leeward Islands and the globalization of finance and production that weaves them in. Regardless, this book affords an opportunity to reflect on emancipation and rethink liberal conceptions of freedom. As Olwig writes, "(t]he ability to absorb the contradictions of freedom may well be one of the most important legacies of emancipation for Caribbean societies" (p. 7).