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

by Samuel Martinez

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594511888
• ISBN13: 9781594511882
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"