In Introducing Cultural Anthropology: Fourth Edition, Roberta Edwards Lenkeit explains a holistic science as "an integrated perspective that assumes interrelationships among the parts of a subject. Anthropology studies humans from a holistic perspective, including both biological and cultural aspects" (Lenkeit 2012: 13). The Gmelchs' were able to apply themselves to the Bajan culture in a way where they took on a humanistic approach while conducting their fieldwork. Humanistic anthropology is applied in order to singularly evaluate a culture without the intrusion of using a comparative method. .
In order to better understand the Gmelchs' findings from the twentieth century, they built historical background, introducing to the reader the occurrences of slavery in order to maintain a steady sugar production within the island. The European colonizers, however, collected the profit made through the sugar production in Barbados. Barbados was used as a setting where the European economy profited from the use of the fertile Bajan land to grow sugar in which they also purchased African slaves who received no pay to grow the sugar, as opposed to employing their own people to do so. The European colonizers gained heavy acquisitions from the Bajan land, without exchanging payment or other incentives for the use of their land. Other than tourism, sugar production, historically and in present time, has been the breadwinner of the Bajan economy. Not only did sugar production benefit the Bajan economy, but also it has remained to be the largest producers and distributors of sugar.
With that being said, the events of slavery, tourism, and sugar production have instilled long lasting effects towards societal and economical practices in Barbados. The Glemches deduced in their ethnography that there was a direct correlation between slavery from the past with present religion, the physical attributes of the local people, and education.
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