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Plastic Straws: A Small Convenience with Big Consequences

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When I was ten years old, I visited Matura Beach in northeast Trinidad with my family for turtle watching. While seeing the turtles up close was surreal, the experience stands out for another, more devastating reason. Our tour guide shared a story I remembered for years to come. She had rescued a turtle that had a plastic straw stuck inside its nose. The idea that one tiny plastic straw could cause so much harm to an animal gutted me. At the time, I found it disturbing, but I didn’t fully understand the severity of the situation. So, I continued using plastic straws, unaware of the larger impact. Now, at twenty, I understand the complex and troubling interconnections between plastic straws, human health, and marine ecosystems. This realisation motivated me to focus my anthropology project on the use of plastic straws, and their environmental and health impacts. My goal was to explore why, despite widespread awareness of their harmful effects, people still choose to use them. In my mini
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Olympic Nostalgia, a Snippet from a Badminton Athlete in Trinidad and Tobago

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As a former competitive badminton player, I was glued to the t.v. during this year’s Olympic Games. I enjoyed the badminton, tennis, volleyball, track & field, and swimming. Watching the badminton matches especially, evoked a sense of nostalgia because a lot of the players were in my age group. Some I had competed against in the Pan American (PanAm) Games and regional Caribbean tournaments. If I had continued badminton, I’d like to think that I would’ve reached that stage. The Olympics were what I had aimed for in my training years. But I was still really proud of the Olympic players. I knew them from the PanAm region and the Caribbean so it was nice to see that representation. I had stopped training during the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns in Trinidad and Tobago in 2020-2022. Lockdown started about two weeks before my teammates and I were supposed to compete during a national tournament. It was a big year for us and we were training really hard. But suddenly we hea
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Racial Stereotypes Replicated in Fantastical Animations

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When I was younger and anime came on the cartoon channels, I knew it was time to go to bed. One night, during the vacation, I sat down and watched an episode of a fantasy program of Japanese origin. I was enchanted with the magic, monsters, and overarching storyline I had never seen in an animated show before. As the years went by, and I watched more anime, first on t.v. and then on streaming platforms, I noticed a pattern in the skin color of the anime characters. I realized that this magical world was infused with the prejudices of the world in which I lived. For my mini-ethnographic project, I sought to understand the attitudes Caribbean youths have toward the profiting of racial and cultural stereotyping in some of their favorite anime shows. In the anime programs that I watched, I had made two casual observations that I wanted to explore for my mini-ethnographic project. The first, there were only a few dark-skinned characters and, the second was that the darker-skinned characters
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Street Vending in Urban Trinidad – Everyday Rituals of Destruction and Reconstruction

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Growing up in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad, I was used to seeing street vendors. I regularly bought from them. Walking along Charlotte Street in downtown Port of Spain on an early Saturday morning meant seeing vendors unloading vegetables and fruits for sale – bananas, apples, lime, lettuce, tomatoes as well as toys, household items and basic electronics like phone accessories, cooking pots and pans – arranging them on tables or stalls, fixing their protection against the sun that would soon come out. Commuters catching transport to work or rushing to get to their workplaces on time weaved in and out of schoolchildren. For this mini-ethnography for my anthropology course, I wanted to explore street vendors’ experiences of buying and selling items, their primary means of income, especially as I used to see police arriving and also chasing vendors away. Then, I would see the vendors return, set up their stalls again and carefully arrange the produce in anticipation of sale
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Virtual Family “Backyard Jams” during COVID-19

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In the mini ethnography that I did in 2021 I wanted to give some insights into how two families used communications technology and social media in a world not only engulfed in diseases and chaos – more so than typically - but also considering the drastic changes in cultures and communications. In my project I observed that the usual behaviors and practices of togetherness changed greatly. Traditionally, Caribbean peoples were used to ‘liming’ (socializing) or doing other official cultural activities like ‘feteing’ (partying) and J’ouvert (during Carnival), all of which reflect norms and desires for togetherness. But with COVID-19, these norms had to be abandoned in favor of safety. However, through immersion in the online world of Family Chat A and Family Chat B, I came to recognize that these families created a virtual liming center that acted as a substitute for the traditional “backyard jams” from a popular soca music song by Farmer Nappy.  At these virtual “backyard jams”, the onli
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Interviews by Zoom: A Refuge for Venezuelan Migrants and Trinidadian Nationals?

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When I conducted interviews with both Venezuelan migrant women and Trinidadians for my undergraduate thesis at university, I came to recognize the distance of our virtual interviewing as a safety zone for both the migrant women and the Trinidadians.  From the perspective of the three Venezuelan women interviewees, being away from the socio-economic and political pressures in their home countries presented a refuge for them. Of course, this is not to say that their standard of living was ideal in Trinidad— keeping in mind factors like low wages, difficulties finding safe, comfortable housing and navigating residence and work requirements— but they were grateful to be out of danger and to have work. They emphasised that they were here to make an “honest living,” and they distinguished themselves from other Venezuelan migrants who demonstrated “comportamiento poco serio” (unserious behaviour). For the interviewees, the ‘unserious’ women created a negative one-sided image about who the Ven
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Reflections of a Guyanese in Ghana

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I learned more about myself and what it means to be “Guyanese” when I left home, more than I had while I lived in Guyana. This is a sentiment to which I’m sure many persons who live outside of their ‘home’ can relate. My sisters and I were the first Guyanese students to attend the Ghana International School.  It was the first time in my life that I ever had to explain where Guyana is geographically located. At first, I began saying we were in South America, but that takes you down the rabbit hole of now having to explain why you don’t speak Spanish. I remember going up to the board in a geography class to show Guyana on the world map because I had a friend who didn’t believe there was an ‘English speaking country in South America that’s part of the Caribbean, but not an island’.  Learning the right clues to help people figure out where Guyana is, it's probably a right of passage for most migrants - especially from small countries in the Global South. I was lucky in two aspects: fir
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