Decency and Excess - Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	Paradigm Publications
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	October 2007
First published:	2007
Authors:	Samuel Mart inez
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 13mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	242
ISBN-13:	978-1-59451-188-2
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General Promotions
LSN:	1-59451-188-8
Barcode:	9781594511882

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