ABSTRACT
Belize is a whole country ‘craze for foreign’. The wide variety of imported consumer goods on sale in shops, on display in homes, and worn and eaten by members of every one of the country‘s nine ethnic groups, is juxtaposed with serious urban and rural poverty. Belize has large areas of unoccupied arable land, yet more than 40 percent of the diet (by value) is imported. Supermarkets stock frozen American vegetables and canned tropical fruit from Hawaii. As in many other Third World countries, some Belizeans are sacrificing their health and their longer-term economic prospects, for goods that are usually considered luxuries (cf. Belk 1988). (Some measures of Belize’s dependence on imports, not just for luxuries and consumer goods, but also for basic staples, can be found in addendum 1 to this paper). My goal here is to make some suggestions about the significance of Belize’s imports in the local systems of value, in political consciousness, and in the creation of visions of the future-the traffic in significance that Hannerz calls the ‘management of meaning/ (1987:550) This is very much a work in progress, part of an ongoing study of consumption and nationalism in Belize which is by no means complete.1
