Modernity - An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad

From cultural studies, sociology, media studies, gender studies and elsewhere there has been a spate of books recently which have attempted to characterize the state of modernity. Many of these have also argued that what is required is ethnographic work to determine how far these supposed trends actually apply to a given population. This book explicitly accepts this challenge. It starts by summarizing some debates on modernity and then argues that the Carribean island of Trinidad is particularly apt for such a study, given the origins of its population in slavery and indentured labour, both forms of extreme social rupture, and the subsequent development of creolisation, the transnational family and economic dependency. The particular focus of this book is on mass consumption and the way goods and imported images such as the soap opera have been used to express and develop a number of key contradictions of modernity. Trinidad also provides considerable material for qualifying and disputing many of the generalisations made in the literature of modernity and postmodernism, for example, the use of concepts such as superficiality, individualism and style.