Global Culture Island Identity

Looking at the development of cultural identity in the global context, this text uses the approach of historical anthropology. It examines the way in which the West Indian Community of Nevis, has, since the 1600s, incorporated both African and European cultural elements into the framework of social life, to create an Afro-Caribbean culture that was distinctive and yet geographically unbounded - a "global culture". The book takes as its point of departure the processes of cultural interaction and reflectivity. It argues that the study of cultural continuity should be guided by the notion of cultural complexity involving the continuous constitution, development and assertion of culture. It emphasizes the interplay between local and global cultures, and examines the importance of cultural display for peoples who have experienced the process of socioeconomic marginalization in the Western world.

^SDraws on social, cultural and postcolonial writings and architectural evidence from various cities around the world to examine existing theories of globalization and also develop new ones.

Most people still think of themselves as belonging to a particular culture. Yet today, many of us who live in affluent societies choose aspects of our lives from a global cultural supermarket, whether in terms of food, the arts or spiritual beliefs. So if roots are becoming simply one more consumer choice, can we still claim to possess a fundamental cultural identity? Global Culture/Individual Identity focuses on three groups for whom the tension between a particular national culture and the global cultural supermarket is especially acute: Japanese artists, American religious seekers and Hong Kong intellectuals after the handover to China. These ethnographic case studies form the basis for a theory of culture which we can all see reflected in our own lives. Gordon Mathews opens up the complex and debated topics of globalization, culture and identity in a clear and lively style.

Geologists, most from Australia and Britain but with some outliers from continental Europe and North America, focus on small islands, where the scarcity of people and resources make migration substantially important socially and economically. The topics include the Azores; historical, cultural, and literary perspectives on emigration from the minor islands of Ireland; Nevis and the post-war labor movement in Britain; islands and the migration experience in the fiction of Jamaica Kincaid; from dystopia to utopia on Norfolk Island; Tongans online; the changing contours of migrant Samoan kinship; and finding a retirement place in sunny Corfu.

This book focuses on the post-emancipation period in the Caribbean and how local societies dealt with the new socio-economic conditions. Scholars from Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, England, Denmark and The Netherlands link this era with the contemporary Caribbean.