M.G. Smith on the Isle of Lesbos: Kinship and Sexuality on Carriacou

In Kinship and Community in Carriacou (1962), M.G. Smith documents “inverted” sexual relations between women in female-headed households on the island.  These lesbian madivines represent statistically significant “deviations” from normative patterns of kinship and residence in domestic groups, and are associated with the shape-shifting witchcraft of sukuyan and lougarou.  Linking Smith’s ethnography of “mating patterns” to changes associated with male out-migration, I rework his ideological explanation of Carriacou lesbianism (as a “mechanism” for preserving female marital fidelity) into a gendered model of sexual economy with comparative regional implications.