Decency and excess : global aspirations and material deprivation on a Caribbean sugar plantation / Samuel Martínez.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Martínez, Samuel, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sugar workers--Dominican Republic--Batey Monte Coca--Social conditions.

Sugar workers.

Sugar workers--Dominican Republic--Batey Monte Coca--Economic conditions.

Commercial products--Social aspects--Dominican Republic--Batey Monte Coca.

Commercial products.

Foreign workers, Haitian--Dominican Republic--Batey Monte Coca.

Foreign workers, Haitian.

Commercial products--Social aspects.

Economic conditions.

Social conditions.

Batey Monte Coca (Dominican Republic)--Ethnic relations.

Batey Monte Coca (Dominican Republic).

Dominican Republic--Batey Monte Coca.

Physical Description:

xiv, 227 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Boulder, CO : Paradigm, [2007]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction

A place no one calls "home" : the plantation and modernity

Living in nowhere

Commodity consumption in a globalizing age

An indecent life

Places and flows

High times in hard times

Material passions

The hot and the cold

Conclusions.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-222) and index.

ISBN:

9781594511875

159451187X

OCLC:

74029426