Decency and Excess: Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation

ISBN-13: 9781594511882 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 242 str.

Samuel Martinez

Opis

Based on periodic ethnographic fieldwork over a span of fifteen years, Martinez shows how impoverished plantation dwellers find ways of coping with the alienation that would be expected while laboring to produce goods for the richer countries. Despite living in dire poverty, these workers live in a thoroughly commodified social environment. Ritual, eroticism, electronic media, household adornment, payday-weekend "binging" are ways even chronically poor plantation residents dream beyond reality. Yet plantation residents' efforts to live decently and escape from the dead hand of necessity also deepen existing divisions of ethnic identity and status. As the divide between "haves" and "have-nots" worsens as a result of neoliberal reform and the decline of sugar in international markets, this book reveals on an intensely human scale the coarsening of the social fabric of this and other communities of the world's poorer nations.

Spis treści

Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: A Place No One Calls 'Home': The Plantation and Modernity Chapter Three: Living in Nowhere Chapter Four: Commodit 36a y Consumption in a Globalizing Age Chapter Five: An Indecent Life Chapter Six: Places and Flows Chapter Seven: High Times in Hard Times Chapter Eight: Material Passions: Batey Dwellers in the World of Good Chapter Nine: The Hot and the Cold Chapter Ten: Conclusions

O autorze

Martinez, Samuel