• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Decency and Excess: Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation

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

Hardcover

Caribbean HistoryAnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 159451187X
ISBN13: 9781594511875
Publisher: Paradigm Publ
Published: Feb 1 2007
Pages: 242
Weight: 1.02
Height: 0.74 Width: 6.36 Depth: 9.27
Language: English
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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

Anthropology