Author Biography:
Alberto Arce and Norman Long are both based in the Department of Sociology at Wageningen University in the the Netherlands. Alberto Arce's research focuses on agricultural and environmental issues. Norman Long has developed an actor-oriented and interface approach to studying development and social change. Both have published widely.

While the diffusion of modernity and the spread of development schemes may bring prosperity, optimism and opportunity for some, for others it has brought poverty, a deterioration in quality of life and has given rise to violence. This collection brings an anthropological perspective to bear on understanding the diverse modernities we face in the contemporary world. It provides a critical review of interpretations of development and modernity, supported by rigorous case studies from regions as diverse as Guatemala, Sri Lanka, West Africa and contemporary Europe.
Together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the crucial importance of looking to ethnography for guidance in shaping development policies. Ethnography can show how people's own agency transforms, recasts and complicates the modernities they experience. The contributors argue that explanations of change framed in terms of the dominantdiscourses and institutions of modernity are inadequate, and that we give closer attention to discourses, images, beliefs and practices that run counter to these yet play a part in shaping them and giving them meaning.
Anthropology, Development and Modernities deals with the realities of people's everyday lives and dilemmas. It is essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and development studies. It should also be read by all those actively involved in development work.

In recent years, food studies scholarship has tended to focus on a number of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts with regard to how capital, markets and states organize and operate. This has led to a gulf between public policy and people's realities with food as experienced in homes and on the streets. Through grounded case studies in seven Latin American countries, this book explores how development and social change in food and agriculture are fundamentally experiential, contingent and unpredictable. In viewing development in food as a socio-political-material experience, the authors find new objects, intersubjectivities and associations. These reveal a multiplicity of processes, effects and affects largely absent in current academic literature and public policy debates. In their attention to the contingency and creativity found in households, neighbourhoods and social networks, as well as at the borders of human-nonhuman experience, the book explores how people diversely meet their food needs and passions while confronting the region's most pressing social, health and environmental concerns.

In recent years, food studies scholarship has tended to focus on a number of increasingly abstract, largely unquestioned concepts with regard to how capital, markets and states organize and operate. This has led to a gulf between public policy and people's realities with food as experienced in homes and on the streets. Through grounded case studies in seven Latin American countries, this book explores how development and social change in food and agriculture are fundamentally experiential, contingent and unpredictable. In viewing development in food as a socio-political-material experience, the authors find new objects, intersubjectivities and associations. These reveal a multiplicity of processes, effects and affects largely absent in current academic literature and public policy debates. In their attention to the contingency and creativity found in households, neighbourhoods and social networks, as well as at the borders of human-nonhuman experience, the book explores how people diversely meet their food needs and passions while confronting the region's most pressing social, health and environmental concerns.

Winner of the 2018 PEN Translates Award for Non-Fiction Features illustrations by the Honduran artist German Andino Welcome to a country that has a higher casualty rate than Iraq. Wander streets considered the deadliest in the world. Wake up each morning to another batch of corpses - sometimes bound, often mutilated - lining the roads; to the screeching blue light of police sirens and the huddles of 'red journalists' who make a living chasing after the bloodshed. But Honduras is no warzone. Not officially, anyway. Ignored by the outside world, this Central American country is ravaged by ultra-violent drug cartels and an equally ruthless, militarised law force. Corruption is rife and the justice system is woefully ineffective. Prisons are full to bursting and barrios are flooded with drugs from South America en route to the US. Cursed by geography, the people are trapped here, caught in a system of poverty and cruelty with no means of escape. For many years, award-winning journalist Alberto Arce was the only foreign correspondent in Tegucigalpa, Honduras's beleaguered capital, and he witnessed first-hand the country's descent into anarchy. Here, he shares his experiences in a series of gripping and atmospheric dispatches: from earnest conversations with narcos, taxi drivers and soldiers, to exposes of state corruption and harrowing accounts of the aftermath of violence. Provocative, revelatory and at time heart-rending, Blood Barrios shines a light on the suffering and stoicism of the Honduran people, and asks the international community if there is more that they can do.