Making of Belize

Globalization theorists predict that the forces of globalization will divide the countries of the world into a few winners and many losers. This book challenges that idea and suggests that the very margins of the global world system—where the construction of local relations and group identities within a deterritorialized, transnational political economy allows for a creative postmodernism—may become the areas of the most creative cultural activity. The difficulties facing those who are globalizing in the margins come from powerful transnational movements such as the environmental movement, the international drug trade, and migrations of people including international tourists. Ironically, instant contact with the rest of the world has created a sense of local identity that transcends the local and is truly multicultural. Belize is a diverse, multicultural society that is both cosmopolitan and deterritorialized, searching for new forms of collective expression, identity, and imagined possibilities, coming into its own as a nation at a time of increasing awareness of global social realities. Perhaps the rreatest challenge faced by Belizeans is the power of the transnational eco-colonialists who have, with missionary zeal, garnered control of land and resources and placed themselves in positions of political power. The present is an end of history for Belize and the beginning of a new era, one that is peculiarly postmodern, globalized, and creative.

ANNE SUTHERLAND is Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her previous books include Caye Caulker: Economic Success in a Belizean Fishing Village (1986) and Gypsies, The Hidden Americans (1986).