The Making of Belize: Globalization in the Margins

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?

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.