from The Jeffersons to The Terminator? And what are the effects of sudden, almost unlimited media access on this previously isolated country? Just what kind of.
Colonial Time and TV Time: Television and Temporality in Belize Richard R. Wilk
The idea that culture orders time is a venerable one in anthropology (i.e. Evans-Pritchard 1940:94-138). If timekeeping is a process of control, a way of imposing order, distance or power on nature and culture, then we need to pay close attention to the cultural instruments that keep and mark time. While in a technological society clocks order the everyday consumption of time, temporality is instituted and constructed by things as diverse as museums and calendars, houses, schoolbooks, births, closets full of shoes, family photographs, and journal articles about other cultures. When looking at the global political economy of time, at the temporal relations between north and south, two instruments stand out. The first is the technoscientific discourse of development and progress, transmitted by thousands of institutions, by government codes, consultancies and classrooms. This discourse displaces other cultures into the past of the dominant "modern" nations. While Fabian (1983) finds this "denial of coevalness" in the bedrock of anthropology, it is more openly expressed and prevalent in the rhetoric of economic growth and development. The second important instrument of global time is the focus of this paper; the global mass media, most of all television. Most critics of media imperialism in the third world focus on the content of individual programs, and on the developed countries' control ofthat content (i.e. Schiller 1976; Burton & Franco 1978; Lee 1989). They argue about whether the TV screen presents images of an attainable reality or a damaging illusion, information or brainwashing. I believe that they are missing the most important point. The greatest impact of television lies not in the content of situation comedies and baseball games, but in the concepts of time and distance carried by the immediacy of the medium. And when television
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acts as a timepiece, it challenges the temporal basis of the legitimacy of the political and economic order in excolonies. Others have noted a close connection between communications media, the cultural sense of the passage of time, and human consciousness. Carey, for example, discusses the way that the telegraph led, for the first time, to a separation of notions of communication and transportation (1989: 213-229). News could precede goods. In the hands of commerce, the telegraph equalized the distribution of knowledge over space, thereby shifting the focus of commercial activity from the manipulation of space to the management of time. For the populace at large, however, the most conspicuous effect of the telegraph was the regularization of standard time, as each town' s clocks were brought into synchrony in 1883 through the efforts of the railroads (Carey 1989:223). For Carey, and others who have written on the industrial regulation of time (i.e. Hareven 1982), temporality is part of the modern state's efforts to control the lives of citizens, part of the global capitalist drama of domination and resistance. A similar theme in media studies is that modern communications media have tended towards "widening the range of reception while narrowing the range of distribution." (Carey 1989:136; see also Williams 1974:29-31) With each new medium, the production of information is more and more concentrated, channeled and controlled, and the audience becomes more passive and anonymous. Television manipulates, controls and sells time, serializing the flow of experience, with the goal of profit (Browne 1984; Williams 1974). As with the manipulation of temporality, control of content enforces the crushing dominance and centralized
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hegemony of mass-produced, northern capitalist consumer culture (Belk & Zhou 1987: Nordenstreng and Vans 1974). I do not intend to challenge these critiques, or deny the power of the media and culture industries. But I do suggest that there are contradictions and complications in the relationships between media, power and temporality. People have the capacity to reappropriate and reinterpret mass produced messages (Leal 1990). Modern media can do other things besides brainwash and control, they can have unpredicted and unintended consequences, and they may end up as weapons turned on their makers. What I have seen in Belize over the last 20 years is too complex, textured and interesting to be forced into a simple pattern of increasing hegemony and the erosion of local cultural autonomy (Wilk 1990; Arnould and Wilk 1984). THE SETTING
Belize, once called British Honduras, is a tiny country 280 km long and 109 km wide, with a population of about 185,000. Independent from Britain since 1981, it rests uneasily alongside its Central American neighbors. Through along history as a British colony it developed close cultural ties with the islands of the Caribbean, but it's ethnic composition has changed dramatically over the last 25 years, because of Latin immigration from Central America and Afro-European ("Creole") emigration to theUnited States. Today the official ethnic composition is about 30% Creole, 44% Hispanic, 11% Mayan, and 7% Garifuna (AfroAmerindian), with a remainder of five other national origins. While Belize has avoided most of the political and military strife that has torn its Central American neighbors, and a long threatened Guatemalan conquest has never come, the country has been shaken to its cultural roots by another invasion that seems even less controllable than Africanized killer bees. American television programming has become a central fact of Belizean daily life. Even in rural areas, the evening hours are captured by the Cosby Show , baseball, and regular network fare from TV movies to CNN news.
Tastes have changed to the point that a 1984 visit by Gary Mathews, outfielder for the Chicago Cubs and a new hero of Belizean youth, drew bigger and more enthusiastic crowds than the visits of Queen Elizabeth and Pope John Paul. Proposed government restrictions on broadcasting foreign television programs were a major factor in the 1983 elections. On the side of limited control through licensing was George Price, a man who was the virtual "father of the country," the only Prime Minister the country ever had, the man who led the country's struggle for independence for more than 25 years. He lost the election and was out of office for five years, partially because he wanted to regulate the TV industry, slowing the flow of soap operas and movies with the goal of protecting Belizean culture from foreign domination. When he returned to power in 1989, his party platform and speeches were conspicuously silent on the issue of television and foreign influence. Many Belizeans and foreigners who treasure the relaxed pace of local life and the lively local culture are worried by foreign TV They feel like they are watching the passing of a whole era of human affairs, a culture of face to face contact, of folksong and storytelling, and its replacement by a poor and cheap copy of what is worst in America. But why is it mostly the rich, foreigneducated Belizean elite, and expatriate foreign residents who are most disturbed, while the average city worker or rural shop-owner seems delighted to watch everything from The Jeffersons to The Terminator? And what are the effects of sudden, almost unlimited media access on this previously isolated country? Just what kind of cultural devastation can Belize expect? COLONIAL TIME
I find the best starting place to approach these issues is the time before any kind of television arrived— the 1960s. The temporal world of the country was dominated then by what I call colonial time; a system that merges time with distance and cultural difference. The three are treated as aspects of the same phenomenon. Time, distance, and culture are almost interchangeable concepts in explaining and justifying the differences
RICHARD WILK IS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY
H E HAS CONDUCTED ARCHEOLOGICAL,
ETHNOHISTORICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELD WORK IN BELIZE OVER THE LAST 2 1 YEARS. HLS BOOK TITLES INCLUDE HOUSEHOUSE ECOLOGY AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY
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between the colony and the metropole. In colonial time the colony is described using metaphors that blend the connotative meanings of time, distance and cultural development together. Primitive, backward, and underdeveloped are blends, while other words draw more directly on temporal, cultural, or spatial meanings (i.e. simple, uncultured, isolated, natural, savage, barbaric, degenerate, primordial, wild, rude, marginal, peripheral, uncivilized). The ultimate effect of colonial time is to objectify the concept of tradition, of a kind of culture that is rooted in a distant time and remote place. The colony is backward because it is dominated by unchanging tradition, timeless, isolated and pervasive. The flow of time in this context is the product of the colonial agents themselves, the administrators, officials, leaders, intelligentsia, and technocrats who collectively represent themselves as agents of "progress"—a term opposed to "tradition" that also merges time, distance and culture. Progress implies movement in time from the unchanging past to the dynamic future, in space from the isolated hinterland to the bustling city, and in culture from static tradition to fashionable modernity. In colonial culture, time is a blueprint for social and political change, it carries the burden of an entire cultural plan. If colonial time is the heart of colonial cosmology, style and fashion are its outward concrete symbols. The gap in fashionable clothes, furnishings, housing styles, language, and customs between the colony and the metropole are seen by participants in the colonial system as the concrete measure of the lag in colonial time between the traditional backwardness of the colony and the modernity of the metropole. The flow of consumer goods and intellectual goods between the metropole and the colony is a form of cultural timekeeping; the objects and ideas are clocks marking off colonial time. The units might be called "years behind." In Belize in the 1950s the fashions seen on the street lagged up to 4 or 5 years behind those of New York. In colonial time this put Belize many "years behind" New York, at an equal age/distance/cultural footing as say, Tegucigalpa or Barbados, but still far "ahead" of rural Belize or a small Caribbean island like Antigua. The irony of colonial time is that while it is premised on the promise of progress, there is really no catching up (Sangari 1987). The lag can become smaller or larger, but the clock is set in the metropole, and the colonies will always be in another time zone. The flow of fashion
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requires the colonies to keep running faster to catch up. They may be able to cut the distance in half each .year, but like Zeno's rabbit, they will never reach their destination. It is this very lag that makes it possible for the metropolitan consumer to savor the archaism of an African mask, an experience that emphasizes the time gap even if the wood of the mask is still green. The middle-class colonial avoided such evidence of backwardness like the plague, and would rather decorate the house with modern western goods. When visiting a highly respected American-educated Ghanaian professor, a man of some culture and great knowledge of African art and custom, I was amazed (and a bit disturbed) to find the walls covered with praying-hands plaques, decoupage Rod McKuen poems, poster-photos of happy pigs with homey jokes, and a large collection of American college football banners. While it may seem an elaborate form of bondage, colonial time served the social and political interests of the colonial elites as well as the metropolitan powers. On the macroeconomic level the demand for metropolitan status goods like clothes, appliance, and even houses will always be assured; even when the colonials are starving, the answer is still progress, and progress is still measured by colonial time (see Chakrabarty 1992). Colonial time lends weight and authority to the ideas, policies, and goals of metropolitan politicians, allowing them to set the terms of debate even when their policies counter the interests of the colony or the colonial elite. On the global scale colonial time affirms the political dependency of the undeveloped and developing on the developed, and keeps the colonial elite in a permanently subordinate position. On the local level, however, the counting of events and processes in colonial time is a potent tool for the colonial elite, for it makes them the timekeepers. The merging of distance, culture and time means the local elite, who can travel to and study in the metropole, are the conduit through which time flows and progress occurs. The metaphors of colonial time allow this process of cultural flow and bridging of physical distance to be recast as "progress." The timeless stasis of tradition is broken only by "change agents" who are in contact with the outside world. The local elite can be these agents, as long as they accept the premise that their home is backward.
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TV TIME
There is nothing inherent in the medium of tele vision that necessarily changes the colonial conception of time. Watching ten year old reruns of / Dream of Genie in a Mexico City hotel in 1978 did nothing but reinforce my feeling that Mexico was "behind" the United States, in some ways parallel, but lagging. The kind of local TV fare offered in many third world countries—budget local programs interspersed among well-produced but outdated metropolitan productions—seems designed as an object lesson in colonial time. The viewer is hard pressed to tell whether the differences between their own experience and those depicted in 'Father Knows Best' are the result of the passage of time, the geographic distance between their country and the USA, or real cultural differences between themselves and Americans. The three distinctions are obscured and collapsed into each other. When news and current events are presented in local programs, their quality and content prove that the present in the ex-colony is years behind the present in the metropole. When I lived in New Mexico, I used to switch back and forth between the news on a Mexican station in Ciudad Juarez, and the news on a US network-affiliate station a few miles north of Juarez in El Paso. The contrast was striking, even though Mexico's television productions are some of the best in the third world. I am sure that many residents of Juarez do the same thing in the evenings, and are struck by the contrast as well. After the news do they watch a faded and scratched tenyear-old American movie dubbed in Spanish on their own station, or do they turn to the Wheel of Fortune or the Cosby Show in English? The narrow political border between the two countries makes it clear that the distance expressed by colonial time is purely metaphorical, though it remains a difficult journey. In this kind of TV the local broadcasting authorities, government regulators, and advertisers still stand between the viewing public and the metropolitan producers of entertainment and news. The local purveyors of foreign media have various national cultural agendas of their own (Mahan 1990). The manual trade of videotapes seems to parallel the other colonial fashion trades. Television can simply become another fashion item, another good on the endless conveyer belt from the metropole to the ex-colonies.
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In 1978 when I first did fieldwork in southern Belize there were four or five video cassette recorders in the local market town. My friends who ran the local Chinese restaurant had one hooked up to a 19 inch color TV behind the bar. Their relatives in San Francisco would record two or three hours of network television each week and send it to them. The dining public, including Kekchi and Mopan Maya from remote villages, would sit for hours and watch everything from used-car commercials and Saturday morning cartoons to network newscasts from six months before. Time, space and culture are collapsed into a single perception of great distance. But there is a new kind of TV Time appearing in places in the third world, a product of satellite technology which was predicted by Raymond Williams (1974:143145). In Belize the movement began in November of 1981 when Arthur Hoare bought a satellite dish and opened CTV broadcasting initially to 24 subscribers (Petch 1988). Today in Belize there are about fifteen television stations (eight in Belize City alone) that operate by taking a direct feed from satellites (Petch 1987 1988,Oliveiral986,Snyderetal. 1991), including religious, government and commercial stations. There are also, in almost every town with a population over 1000, cable networks which offer a full range of American stations, including sports channels, news, movies and pay-per-view. From my own survey of a random sample of 300 households in Belize City, I estimate that about 35% of urban people have access to cable, and almost all of the rest receive rebroadcasts; 95 percent of the urban population has daily access to TV, and more than half of adults surveyed stated that they watch television at least several times a week. Television penetration is high in all social and income strata; it is only slightly higher in English speaking households than in Spanish-speaking ones. There are no good current data on VCR ownership, but merchants in Belize City report that videotape rentals have declined rapidly as cable access to movie channels has improved, and as local broadcasters frequently show recent film releases. In smaller towns video rentals are more important. Rural areas depend almost exclusively on broadcast television. The Belizean television operators pay no royalties, and are therefore operating illegally, and there has been some diplomatic dispute between the two governments over the issue. Most stations, under legal pressure from
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the government, offer a very limited amount of local news, public affairs and sports programming—an average of less than 45 minutes per day, most of it produced by the government news service. The small size of the local market, and difficulties in collecting advertising revenue from cable operators have been prohibitive obstacles for most local video production. One American-born producerfilmsatopical weekly show about local politics and news, and he has recently opened his own broadcast station which has Belize s only non-government television news, and a weekly Caribbean news program from Jamaica. Local announcements and commercials are inserted into foreign programs, but many American advertisements are also broadcast intact, especially in smaller towns. It is not unusual for Belizean viewers to see advertisements from used car dealers in Denver and restaurants in Chicago. For a good part of the day Belize television consumers are watching real time broadcast television from the United States. The most popular types of programs are, in decreasing order, sports, soap operas, news, and situation comedy (based on a survey of 460 adults in 1990). In 1990 the most popular single program in Belize City was the Cosby Show One of the most popular rebroadcasts is WGN from Chicago. Many Belizeans have become avid Chicago Cubs fans, and in fifteen years the popularity of soccer and cricket have declined, while baseball and basketball have soared. When the Cubs made it into the playoffs in 1983 the country came to a standstill for days, and shops closed during the games. One radical politician told me that the baseball-brainwashing of Belizean children had gone so far that he had heard them singing 'The Star Spangled Banner' before starting their games! This pattern is not unique to Belize—all over the Americas where there is access to the satellites, there is access to direct, up-to-the-minute programming from the metropole, some of it in Spanish. Similar satellite networks are rapidly spreading in the eastern hemisphere. Why does direct broadcast transmission make such a difference? Because the programs, especially the sports and news broadcasts, are so immediate. There is no lag. The Belizean family in their rickety house in a swamp on the edge of Belize City is not only watching the same programs as urban North America, but far more importantly, they are watching them at the same time. What the Belizeans are watching is happening now.
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Satellite television has removed an essential element from the equation of colonial time. Distance between the metropole and the colony can no longer be reckoned in terms of time. The immediacy of contact makes it unalterably clear that only distance and culture set Belize apart from the United States, not time. TV time is now a single clock ticking away a single rhythm in every place it reaches, a continuous cycle of news, advertising, entertainment and special events. TV time is alarming and strange atfirst—itis the direct experience of a flow of events that was once far away, safely filtered, and dimly and indirectly perceived. Things seem to be moving more quickly, almost out of control.
TV TIME, CULTURE, AND POLITICS
And for the political and cultural elite, TV time is out of control. The conduits of power have been circumvented. Fashion is no longer channeled through the local elite because information flows directly from television to the masses. Ten years ago when someone returned from a trip to New York or Miami they strutted their new clothes around for weeks, tried out their new words at parties, and displayed the latest bit of technology in their home. Today the latest fashions from New York are visible every friday night on MTV Raps. When the film Batman was released in the United States in the summer of 1989, T-shirts and other accessories with the Batman logo appeared on the streets in Belize City within two weeks. The consumption styles of the Belize elite are revealed as frauds or shallow imitations—though they presume to sit on top of the local heap, they cannot come close to matching what everyone can see on Falcon Crest, in the advertisements, on the news. The local elite is no longer the only thing to emulate or envy, for it is no longer the source of new things, the local agent and representative of the metropole. They no longer sit ahead of everyone else on the time line. In this light the laments about television that pour from Belize's educated elite acquires a new meaning. From right wing conservative businessmen to the radical intelligentsia, television is decried as the force that is crushing nascent Belizean national consciousness. In interviews I have been told, "We are going to lose our traditions." "Our national identity is disappearing." "We are becoming Americanized in every way." People
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who themselves have spent years at school in the United States acquiring the credentials of the elite, now come home and express shock at how "little Belize" has been ruined by American television (though they are the first to get cable in their neighborhood). Elsewhere I have argued that by presenting an image of an objectified "other," foreign television has actually done more to stimulate nationalism and national cultural development than has local cultural production by the educated elite (Wilk 1993). These statements from the local elites reflect the diminished value of their role as retailers of metropolitan cultural capital and cultural dependency (cf. MartinBarbero 1988). In fact, television allows Belizeans to perceive the culture of their nation in ways that were not available before. Colonial time served the purpose of the metropole by making the distance between the colony and the metropole uncrossable. It clouded and obscured a crushing dominance. Colonial time rationalized exploitation, poverty, and domination by submerging them in the terms of backwardness, underdevelopment, and primitivism. TV time has removed one of the ideological props of the colonial and post-colonial world order. Watching the Lakers playoff on a TV in Belize City, there is an immediacy of experience, an emotional involvement in the present on an equal basis with viewers in Los Angeles and New York. Your reception is not poorer, you are not seeing a game that happened last week, you are in the here and now. And when the game is over, both the stinks and the aromas of Belize City are in the here and now too, there is no escaping it. To steal Conrad' s metaphor from Heart ofDarkness, the journey upriver is no longer ajourneybackintime.lt is just atrip upriver that takes some time. The lack of speed is a problem, not a metaphor, and it can be overcome by applying a bit of technology. If things are different upriver it is not because of some kind of time lag. We can't just sit back and expect that problems will be solved when Belize "catches up." Between Belize and the United States the time lag is gone, the distance is closing, what remains are cultural, economic, and political differences that require new explanations, or new rationalizations. By changing temporality, TV time must also alter local systems of control and power. The tragedy is not so much that local culture will disappear. There seems to be little objectively measurable increase in the
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"Americanization" of Belizean institutions, customs, or even language (Wilk 1990). The lasting tragedy is instead that important kinds of power have now moved entirely out of the country to the metropole. While colonial time left something for a local elite, TV time is established entirely in the metropolitan centers; as consumers of information and programming the Belizeans have no power to affect what they see, except to turn it on and off (Martin-Barbero 1988). The control of time cannot be regained. The rhythms of life now move in accord with the cycles of sport (baseball season, basketball season, superbowl Sunday), the cycles of weekly programming (Thursday night, Cosby Show), and the the daily schedules of soaps. (In 1990 my fieldwork in a rural community came to a halt every afternoon at 4:30 when people turned on televisions powered by car batteries, to watch Another World.) And for many the new rhythm of life includes periodic flights to Chicago, Miami or Los Angeles, where they know what to expect, having seen it on the tube. Of course, television itself is not the only instrument that has unleashed TV time on Belize. Other kinds of flows have also done a great deal to break down linkages between time, distance and culture in dramatic ways. More than 200,000 tourists now visit the country each year, and while most are still cordoned-off in the offshore enclaves of the diving resorts, the boom in ecotourism has brought larger numbers of visitors into what has recently been labeled "the interior." American tourists in rural villages peerin the windows of Belizeans who are watching Americans on television. And relatively cheap air and ground transportation through permeable borders have given many Belizeans a firsthand taste of American culture; in my urban survey about 40% of adults had visited the United States and 15% had lived there for more than three months. 76% reported having a close relative in a foreign country, and in many areas a majority of households receive remittances from abroad. All of these kinds of contact tend to highlight cultural and geographic differences, while breaking down temporal ones. Most of the return migrants I interviewed spoke of economic and cultural differences between the "States" and Belize without using temporal metaphors of progress, tradition and backwardness. Many saw Belize as a haven, not a backwater.
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CONCLUSION
While Belize as a nation has lost a measure of control of TV time, it may not end up such a bad bargain. Certainly a better understanding of cultural, spatial and temporal distance has resulted. Fashions and products from outside the country have lost some of their magic— they are no longer gifts from the future that carry the message of inevitability. Local products are seeing something of a resurgence, because they are no longer "behind the times"—they may be inferior or superior, dear or a bargain, but they can now be assessed qualitatively without the extra baggage of being symbols of time. They are no longer mimics of things out of date in the metropole (the despised aspect of colonial goods), but can now be presented as objects that exist in the legitimate present. This is an enormous change in a country that has been exporting raw materials and importing everything else for 350 years. Sandwiched in the two minute gaps between episodes of the Jeffersons, advertisements for local products, churches, and politicians now have a powerful implicit message. TV time is a key factor in understanding the process of making and expressing history in ex-colonies. Under colonial time, the present was history, dripping with inferences of archaism and tradition, "rooted in the past." TV time allows for explicit historical references, by separating the present from the past. To give an example, a box of Belizean matches is undesirable in colonial time, because the object is archaic. The design of the box and the poor quality wooden sticks are the products of an outdated technology. This kind of artifact has been around for a long time, and it has long been replaced by better products in the metropolitan countries. Similarly, local foods are "traditional," reflecting the inability to procure foreign foods, and a background in the backward "bushy" parts of the country where people don't even know modern foods. But TV time helps sever these items from their temporal, historical baggage. The box of matches can now become merely "old fashioned," local food can become national cuisine, "roots" food, or ethnic cooking. Historical items can now represent the familiarity, security and continuity of the past, rather than the uncertainty and shame of being backward or retarded. Local customs are becoming symbols of identity and pride rather than badges of ignorance and isolation.
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As a number of anthropologists have recently suggested, history is itself a cultural construction, and western linear history is a particularly western product that grew along with the colonial world system. The expansion that turned the rest of the world into peoples without history gave the colonies a master narrative of progress, which left the colonial subject with a historical clock which could only count cultural difference (Chakrabarty 1992:59). But TV time seems to have the power to unfreeze clocks, by extracting the present from the past and objectifying both. It allows time and events to be separated from each other and ordered into sequences that do not all lead inevitably in the same direction—toward the metropole. TV time frees the past from its colonial bondage and makes it fertile ground for political dispute in the present. A growing political awareness is one possible result. But of course, satellite television is no informational panacea; behind its illusion of chaotic open choice are some very narrow channels of capital and control. Caldarola( 1992) argues that satellite television coverage of the Gulf war deliberately manipulated the temporality of the medium, distorting the relationship between temporality and distance to further the war agenda. The immediacy of the medium, in his view, denied history, submerged the real in a fictional narrati ve, and reinforced the cultural and temporal distance between the global viewing audience and the country being bombed. Martin-Barbero sees similar contradictory processes at work in other parts of Latin America, in what he labels the "emergence of the popular;" "This reconceptualization of culture, theoretically as much as socially, legitimizes that other experience which is the popular; in its multiple and active existence this refers us not only to the past but to the present, uncovering its conflictuality and creativity for us, its noncontemporaneity, which is not merely backwardness but an open breach with modernity and with the logic with which capitalism seems to exhaust the reality of the present." (1988: 453-454) I don't think it is a coincidence that with the arrival of satellite television, history is re-emerging as an important topic of public interest and participation in Belize. The interpretation of events at a minor 18th century battle has been an important campaign issue in the last three national elections (Judd 1989). A national historical society was founded in 1990, and has begun to identify landmarks and heroes, creating a local
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narrative of progress, growth and development which is no longer completely submerged in the global temporal order. But the breakdown of the global narrative of progress, and of the stable geographic and moral duality of the cold war raises questions for Belize which cannot be answered with historical revisionism. The creation of new kinds of spatial, temporal and cultural order will likely be at the center of Belize's political struggles well into the next century.
NOTE
An earlier version of this paper, written in 1988, was published under a slightly different title in the journal Belizean Studies 17(1): 3-13. Substantial portions of that publication have been incorporated into a paper on consumerism in Belize, published in Culture & History (Wilk 1990). A revision was presented at the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society in 1989, at the invitation of Henry Rutz. The present version has benefited from hindsight, and from comments and critiques of these earlier drafts, particularly by Elizabeth Hahn, Daniel Miller, Orvar Lofgren, Anne Pyburn, Victor Caldarola, Stewart Krohn, Faye Ginsburg, one anonymous reviewer, and the members of seminars in the Indiana University departments of journalism and mass communication, where I have presented drafts of this work. REFERENCES
Arnould, E. J. and Richard Wilk 1984 Why do the Indians Wear Adidas? Advances in Consumer Research 11: 748-752. Belk, Russell and Nan Zhou 1987 Learning to Want Things. Advances in Consumer Research 14:478-481. Browne, Nick 1984 The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text. Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Summer: 174-182. Burton, Jullianne and Jean Franco 1978 Culture and Imperialism. Latin American Perspectives 1:2-12. Caldarola, Victor 1992 Time and the Television War. Public Culture 4(2): 127-136.
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Chakrabarty, Dipesh 1992 The Death of History? Historical Consciousness and the Culture of Late Capitalism. Public Culture 4(2): 47-66. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1940 The Nuer. New York: Oxford University Press. Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Hareven, Tamara 1982 Family Time and Industrial Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Judd, Karen 1989 Who Will Define Us? Creole History and Identity in Belize. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C. Leal, Ondina F 1990 Popular Taste and the Erudite Repertoire: The Place and Space of Television in Brazil. Cultural Studies 4(1): 19-29. Lee, Wei-Na 1989 The Mass-Mediated Realities of Three Cultural Groups. Advances in Consumer Research 16: 771 778. Mahan, Elizabeth 1990 Communications, Culture and the State in Latin America. Journal of lnteramerican Studies and World Affairs 32:146-154. Martin-Barbero, Jesus 1988 Communication from Culture: The Crisis of the National and the Emergence of the Popular. Media, Culture and Society 10:447-465. Nordenstreng, K. and T. Varis 1974 Television Traffic: A One-way Street? Paris: Unesco. Oliveira, Omar 1986 "Satellite television and Dependency: An Empirical Approach." Gazette 38:127-145. Petch, Trevor 1987 "Television and Video Ownership in Belize." Belizean Studies. 15(1): 12-14. 1988 Belize, in Manuel Alvarado, ed., Video WorldWide. London: John Libbey and Unesco. pp. 311321. Sangari, Kumkum 1987 The Politics of the Possible. Cultural Critique Fall: 157-186.
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Schiller, Herbert 1976 Communication and Cultural Domination. New York: International Arts and Sciences Press. Snyder, Leslie, Connie Rose and Steven Chaffee 1991 Foreign Media and the Desire to Emigrate from Belize. Journal of Communication 41(1): 117-132. Williams, Raymond 1974 Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken.
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WiIk, Richard j 9 9 Q ConsumerGoods as Dialogue about Development. Culture & History 7: 79-100. 1 9 9 3 " It > s Destroying a Whole Generation"- Television a n d y[0Ta\ Discourse in Belize. Visual Anthropology 5:229-244.
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