Modernity

"Ethnography of Trinidad focuses on processes of mass consumption. Asserts that Trinidadians confront problems of 'modernity' (focus on the present as divorced from the past, concomitant need to recreate moral premises, sense of 'compression of space-time,' sense of instability, desire for subjective experience, 'sense of the private'), and construct their 'selves' and their culture through consumption. Trinidad manifests 'a culture which is self-constructed, in full knowledge that it is in fact self-constructed.'"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.