Samuel Martinez

Decency and Excess

Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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 intenselyhuman scale the coarsening of the social fabric of this and other communities of the world's poorer nations.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Taylor & Francis
• Seitenzahl: 242
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Februar 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 162mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 463g
• ISBN-13: 9781594511875
• ISBN-10: 159451187X
• Artikelnr.: 21444581

Autorenporträt

Martinez, Samuel

Inhaltsangabe

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 A Place No One Calls "Home"
Chapter 3 Living in Nowhere
Chapter 4 Commodity Consumption in a Globalizing Age
Chapter 5 An Indecent Life
Chapter 6 Places and Flows
Chapter 7 High Times in Hard Times
Chapter 8 Material Passions
Chapter 9 The Hot and the Cold
Chapter 10 Conclusions