Global Culture, Island Identity

Abstract

This analysis offers a historical, anthropological perspective on the development of cultural identity in a global context. It does so through a case study of a West Indian community which since the 1600s has incorporated African and European cultural elements within a common framework of social life, in the process creating the basis for a culturally all-encompassing and geographically unbounded “global” or inclusive culture. This global culture has become extended to Western metropoles, as viable migrant communities in North America and Britain have become established during the course of this century, influencing the culture of the host societies. This discussion of global cultural processes therefore offers a historical, anthropological analysis of a phenomenon which has been associated with the “post-modern” times of the contemporary world. The global quality of West Indian culture is seen to be related to the circumstances of slavery and colonialism which sought to suppress and make invisible the Afro-Caribbean community within the island society. For this reason the Afro-Caribbean people employed colonial institutions, to which they gained access, as frameworks within which to formalize and display a culture which they saw as their own. After emancipation these frameworks increasingly derived from migration destinations in the West Indies, North America and Britain, where waged employment was available. In the course of these historical processes a global culture emerged which was characterized by its ability to cultivate and promote a locally developed system of values and practices through the appropriation of external cultural forms. Research for this book began in 1978, when, during a fieldtrip on St. John in the Virgin Islands, I interviewed a number of immigrant workers as part of a study on the impact of American mass tourism on island society. Many of the migrants were from Nevis, and upon completion of the research on tourism I began to study the system of migration which had brought so many Nevisians to the island. Nevisian migration to St. John turned out to be part of a larger pattern of transnational movement of people, goods and remittances which I suspected might have wider implications. The way in which this transnational movement sustained, and in turn was sustained by, a global community of Nevisians living in different parts of the world suggested that the traditional place-centred orientation of anthropology was inadequate. If even the smallest and most remote of islands was so global in scope, this was a subject which seemed to warrant more attention. During the 1980s fieldwork therefore was expanded to include not just the home island of Nevis, but also migration destinations in Leeds, England, and New Haven, USA.