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The Making of Belize: Globalization in the Margins | 
 enlarge | Author: Anne Sutherland
Publisher: Bergin & Garvey Paperback
Category: Book
Buy New: $31.95
New (13) Used (6) from $17.95
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 1099827
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0897895835
Dewey Decimal Number: 972.8205
EAN: 9780897895835
ASIN: 0897895835
Publication Date: July 30, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
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 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 greatest 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Anecdotal information on Belize is delicious! May 12, 1999
Belize Traveller (North Carolina)
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
Reading this book on Belize is a little like eating a coconut. First you have to get through the hard shell before you can enjoy the sweet nut. In this case, the hard shell is the academic context. Sutherland is a professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota. To the degree her book is directed to a professional audience, with arguments about the "core/periphery model," "ecocolonialism" and "global cultural flow," Sutherland risks losing the attention of the lay reader.The sweet meats here are Sutherland's endlessly fascinating recollections of her own experiences in Belize, especially on Caye Caulker and on north Ambergris Caye. Sutherland's mother (the redoubtable Lois Peyton Hartley Sutherland Young) and other family members are long-time Belize hands, having first visited the country in 1971. Sutherland came to Caye Caulker in 1972, when the island had no telephone, no television, and no hotels. She has watched it, and all of Belize, change in just a decade or two from an isolated backwater to a place closely connected to the world by the Internet, pirated cable TV and an all-digital, fiber-optic telephone system. This is also a primer on Belizean politics, economics, tourism, media and family life. Her chapter on "Flapping Around" is an eye-opener. Some may have a hard time buying Sutherland's theories that Belize "skipped modernity," jumping from developing country to "postmodern" nation and that some of the most creative cultural activity is going on "in the margins" in countries like Belize. But her delicious anecdotes of Belize since independence are reason enough to grab a copy of this book.
The best on Belize June 11, 2003
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
In many ways Belize has fallen into a black hole in academic literature. Who would want to study an English-speaking carribean nation located in the Yucatan? No many people see it as a serious topic, and that is a shame. I read this book before traveling to Caye Caulker several years ago. I found it very interesting, and the best academic book on Belize. Get the book if you ever plan on traveling to Belize...and who wouldn't want to?
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