Just off the north-south road that skirts the Atlantic coast of Martinique, ‘a mini-village made up of rural huts from the 19505 … pennits the new generation to discover the scenes their ancestors knew, the way of life of their parents and grandparents…. Four years in the making, this open-air museum is a gem of tradition. On Sunday afternoons … members of the folkloric troupe Madinina install themselves there to recreate a living portrait of that bygone era’ (Staszewski, 1993:48-50). A few kilometers to the south, in the cove of Anse Figuier, another privately-run museum, the island's first ‘éco musée', also targets the 19505 - ‘the traditional society we have forgotten in our rush to modernity. . fa Martinique pro[onde’ (E. H-H., 1992:44-5).

Nostalgia for the ‘ancestral’ way of life is big in 1990s Martinique. Celebration of the ‘patrimoine’ permeates the local press, radio, and T.V., animated by artists, musicians, dancers, tale-tellers, writers, theater groups, and cultural associations. Commercialized folklore is available at every village fete and large hotel, and it floods the airwaves. One might well ask, why this surge of interest in the everyday life of only a generation ago?

The early 1960s marked a watershed in Martinique and its sister department of Guadeloupe. France began an aggressive program of development and integration that transformed these island neo-colonies into modern consumer societies with the highest standards of living in the region. Infrastructure boomed: roads, electricity, telephones, and piped water arrived in the most remote communities, and airports and hotels were dramatically expanded. Social programs (a panoply of welfare benefits, pensions, unemployment insurance) pumped cash into family budgets. The standard size of houses tripled even as family size began to plummet. Agriculture was encouraged to atrophy as service industries (and the civil service) burgeoned. The number of cars per family quickly came to rival that in the US. Supermarkets, as well as megastores for building products, appliances, and other consumer goods, sprang up across the landscape; in the context of both France and the wider world, Guadeloupe and Martinique became the largest per capita consumers of champagne anywhere. The media were modernized and contributed to making the French language a part of everyone's daily life.