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

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Description

In accordance with periodic ethnographic fieldwork over a span of fifteen years, Martinez shows how impoverished plantation dwellers in finding ways of dealing with the alienation that may be expected at the same time as laboring to provide goods for the richer countries. In spite of 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. Because the divide between “haves” and “have-nots” worsens because 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 sector’s poorer nations.

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