Defining Caymanian Identity: The Effects of Globalization, Economics and Xenophobia on Caymanian Culture by Christopher A. Williams (review)

Abstract

the prosperous Cayman Islands” (xiii), a “truly cosmopolitan, international destination caught irreversibly and irresistibly in the grip of globalization” (xiii), Christopher A. William sets out to show how “globalization’s multicultural and multi-ethnic auras have permeated a distinctly indigenous Caymanian cultural awareness to ensure its dilution, subsequent fracturing and diversification” (xiii). This opening salvo is captured well in the introduction, “Globalisation Rising” (xiii–xxxiii). For readers who did not know and those already aware, the data presented to highlight the Cayman Islands’ economic reality is impressive. Cayman – a British dependency constituted in three low-lying limestone islands with a landmass of merely 100.4 square miles – is globally ranked sixteenth in terms of GDP per capita, with its average workers earning incomes thousands of dollars higher than those of the United States of America, Germany and Japan; its citizens enjoying the highest quality of life in the Caribbean (xiii–xxxiii). For Williams, given all of this, Cayman has become “open to the countervailing negative effects of globalization, including xenophobic, exclusionary and ethnocentric postures” (vi). He therefore sets out to provide a chronological account of the “development, indigenization and multicultural proliferation” (vi) out of and, of necessity, inevitably away from “original Caymanian identity” (3–30). The result is an historical account of modern Cayman (the three islands), albeit, one centred on its social relations. The book contains eight chapters spread over three major subsections, the first two traces the ethno-genesis of Caymanian people from a time when globalization was way off, and when life was financially and materially difficult. The period discussed here dates backs to the uninhabited and inconsequential days before and after the islands were first sighted Christopher A. Williams. Defining Caymanian Identity: The Effects of Globalization, Economics and Xenophobia on Caymanian Culture. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Press, 2015. vii + 351 pp