Comfa Religion and Creole Language in a Caribbean Community

Kean Gibson

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xviii + 244 pp.

Annemarie Gallaugher, York University

In this very useful study, Kean Gibson, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, focuses on the rituals, beliefs, and practices of a contemporary African-derived religion in Guyana known as Comfa. It is a text chock full of sociohistoric and ethnographic detail (the author has some 10 years' research experience in the area and has produced two documentaries) as well as a wide range of theoretical ideas crossing anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. As such, the book …