ABSTRACT
The car, and by extension the taxi, has become one of the most common foci of aspiration among young boys in rural Jamaica. Damian stands for Pentecostalism, the dominant ideology of contemporary Jamaican Christianity. A significant percentage of the Jamaican population, mainly older people who have settled down as child carers, or young people still under their influence, largely give their lives to these ideals. In Jamaica money is used to express the internal relations of families in a way that most English people would see as far too individualistic. So there certainly is a form of individualism in Jamaica that derives from long-standing features of Jamaican society and has nothing to do with contemporary neo-liberalism. Madrid is a modern urban centre, far removed from rural Jamaica, and yet Murray indicates how an individual objectifies Madrid in a manner that corresponds to the case from rural Jamaica, not that of London.
