Book Description
Ecuador is the third-largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the western United States. As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements.
Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequalityâthat is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belongingâas they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.
Customer Reviews:
Globalization on the ground in Amazonia.......2007-05-31
This is one of the best books on indigenous politics that has been written. The author's 20 years of experience in the Ecuadoran Amazonia show in the depth of her narrative and in her careful and accessible use of Foucault to draw out the complexities of indigenous identity, conceptions of nation and nationalism, and the impact of global forces. It is also beautifully written. Clearly, a labor of love and conviction by a scholar who has spent hours listening to indigenous activists , oil company officials, state officials, NGO workers, academics, and, most importantly native Ecuadorans of widely diverse political views and fashioned a wonderful book. If you are interested in all the complex political issues surrounding globalization as seen from the Amazon, you don't need a Ph.D to find this a great read
Book Description
The Andean region is among the most fascinating and well-known centers of civilization. While understanding the Andes in local terms is crucial, Andean prehistory is also relevant to the comparative study of complex societies worldwide. This book addresses the need to explore the rich history of this region in a manner that is illuminating not only to Andean scholars, but also to those readers who may be less familiar with Andean prehistory and its non-Western principles of organization. Andean Archaeology has been designed explicitly for students, archaeologists, and general readers looking for an innovative and contemporary overview of this important area of archaeological study.Andean Archaeology explores the rise of civilization in the Central Andes from the time of the region's earliest inhabitants to the emergence of the Inca state many thousands of years later. The volume progresses chronologically and culturally to reveal the processes by which multiple Andean societies became increasingly complex. Comprising thirteen newly commissioned chapters written by leading archaeologists, Andean Archaeology presents the central debates in contemporary Inca and Andean archaeology. By drawing together the work of various researchers, this volume provides a multi-vocal perspective, informed by diverse theoretical frameworks and representing current thinking in the field.
Book Description
From McGraw-Hill Contemporary Learning Series (formerly known as McGraw-Hill/Dushkin), the Global Studies volumes are designed to provide comprehensive background information and selected world press articles on the regions and countires of the world. This twelfth edition of GLOBAL STUDIES: LATIN AMERICA includes introductory essays on Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Carribbean region, with concise reports and current statistics for each of the countries within these regions. This background information is complemented by a selection of articles from the world press.
Customer Reviews:
Very informative.......2003-07-16
I took Latin American studies as a "blowoff" class in college, but this book coupled with the other text were EXTREMELY informative, and I found myself very wrapped up in the subject. I found myself to be quite ignorant of everything below the Texan border. I'm really glad the Prof. used this book.
Book Description
None of the Above is a state-of-the-art volume about current debates regarding Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, both in the United States and on the Island. The title simultaneously refers to the results of a non-binding 1998 plebiscite held in San Juan to determine the Island's political status, the ambiguities that have historically characterized Puerto Rican political agency, and the complexities of Puerto Rican ethnic, national, and cultural identifications.
Book Description
The Expediency of Culture is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly globalized world. George Yúdice explores critically how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends. Through a dazzling series of illustrative studies, Yúdice challenges the Gramscian notion of cultural struggle for hegemony and instead develops an understanding of culture where cultural agency at every level is negotiated within globalized contexts dominated by the active management and administration of culture. He describes a world where âhighâ culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain) is a mode of urban development, rituals and everyday aesthetic practices are mobilized to promote tourism and the heritage industries, and mass culture industries comprise significant portions of a number of countries’ gross national products.
Yúdice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean that today’s increasingly transnational cultureâexemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizationsâis necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. Yúdice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art eventâ insite a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on the city of Miami as one of a number of transnational âcultural corridorsâ and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.
Book Description
New concerns with the intersections of culture and power, historical agency, and the complexity of social and political life are producing new questions about the United States’ involvement with Latin America. Turning away from political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters and victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking collection suggest alternate ways of understanding the role that U.S. actors and agencies have played in the region during the postcolonial period.
Exploring a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters in Latin America, these theoretically engaged essays by distinguished U.S. and Latin American historians and anthropologists illuminate a wide range of subjects. From the Rockefeller Foundation’s public health initiatives in Central America to the visual regimes of film, art, and advertisements; these essays grapple with new ways of conceptualizing public and private spheres of empire. As such, Close Encounters of Empire initiates a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the long-standing scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in the Americas as it rethinks the cultural dimensions of nationalism and development.
Book Description
In this groundbreaking study of American imperialism, leading legal scholars address the problem of the U.S. territories. Foreign in a Domestic Sense will redefine the boundaries of constitutional scholarship.
More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five âunincorporatedâ U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States’ unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these âmarginalâ regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large.
This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico’s status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories.
Contributors. José Julián Ãlvarez González, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, José A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, José TrÃas Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner
Customer Reviews:
AN EFFECTIVE WAY TO READ THE REAL PERSPECTIVE.......2004-03-25
THIS IS AN ENGAGING AND EFFECTIVE WAY TO PRESENT THE ETHIOLOGY OF A DILEMA THAT HAS BEEN OUT OF FOCUS FOR ONE HUNDRED YEARS. THE EDITORS HAVE CHOSEN A VARIED SPECTRUM OF VIEWS, AND IT IS THROUGH THESE DIFFERENT LENSES THAT THE ISSUE SHOULD BE DISCUSSED.
Fundamental analysis.......2001-10-24
If you need to read about Puerto Rico or are doing research, this should be your first stop. This book is the most comprehensive and well documented book ever written on the legal situation of Puerto Rico. Anybody who has anything to do with the island needs to read this book first.
Average customer rating:
- fascinating insights
- Accessible and well written
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Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (American Encounters/Global Interactions)
Eileen J. Suárez Findlay , and
Eileen J. Suárez Findlay
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
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ASIN: 0822323966 |
Book Description
Feminists, socialists, Afro-Puerto Rican activists, and elite politicians join laundresses, prostitutes, and dissatisfied wives in populating the pages of Imposing Decency. Through her analyses of Puerto Rican anti-prostitution campaigns, attempts at reforming marriage, and working-class ideas about free love, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay exposes the race-related double standards of sexual norms and practices in Puerto Rico between 1870 and 1920, the period that witnessed Puerto Rico’s shift from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.
In showing how political projects and alliances in Puerto Rico were affected by racially contingent definitions of âdecencyâ and âdisreputability,â Findlay argues that attempts at moral reform and the state’s repression of âsexually dangerousâ women were weapons used in batttles between elite and popular, American and Puerto Rican, and black and white. Based on a thorough analysis of popular and elite discourses found in both literature and official archives, Findlay contends that racialized sexual norms and practices were consistently a central component in the construction of social and political orders. The campaigns she analyzes include an attempt at moral reform by elite male liberals and a movement designed to enhance the family and cleanse urban space that ultimately translated into repression against symbollically darkened prostitutes. Findlay also explores how U.S. officials strove to construct a new colonial order by legalizing divorce and how feminist, labor, and Afro-Puerto Rican political demands escalated after World War I, often focusing on the rehabilitation and defense of prostitutes.
Imposing Decency forces us to rethink previous interpretations of political chronologies as well as reigning conceptualizations of both liberalism and the early working-class in Puerto Rico. Her work will appeal to scholars with an interest in Puerto Rican or Latin American studies, sexuality and national identity, women in Latin America, and general women’s studies.
Customer Reviews:
fascinating insights.......2003-01-22
I am the grandchild of a Puerto Rican woman who lived on the island about the time this book was written. I was absolutely fascinated by the book and found it explained a lot about attitudes toward race and sexuality that prevailed in my own family that I'd always found contradictory and inexplicable.
I generally avoid books written by academicians because their writing style is usually turgid, wordy and devoid of life. Not so this book. While it does carefully document its subject, the writing is lively and engaging.
A must-read for anyone who wants insight into a fascinating aspect of Puerto Rican culture.
Accessible and well written.......2000-05-16
Well researched and engaged with the scholarly discussion, yet readable and at times very elegantly argued. The book contributes to discussions of race and sexuality and should be of interest to many more than the few academics in Latin American history and women's studies. Those people, and many others interested in those and related fields, however, MUST read it!
Book Description
Demonstrating that globalization is a centuries-old phenomenon, From Silver to Cocaine examines the commodity chains that have connected producers in Latin America with consumers around the world for five hundred years. In clear, accessible essays, historians from Latin America, England, and the United States trace the paths of many of Latin America’s most important exports: coffee, bananas, rubber, sugar, tobacco, silver, henequen (fiber), fertilizers, cacao, cocaine, indigo, and cochineal (insects used to make dye). Each contributor follows a specific commodity from its inception, through its development and transport, to its final destination in the hands of consumers. The essays are arranged in chronological order, according to when the production of a particular commodity became significant to Latin America’s economy. Someâsuch as silver, sugar, and tobaccoâwere actively produced and traded in the sixteenth century; othersâsuch as bananas and rubberâonly at the end of the nineteenth century; and cocaine only in the twentieth.
By focusing on changing patterns of production and consumption over time, the contributors reconstruct complex webs of relationships and economic processes, highlighting Latin America’s central and interactive place in the world economy. They show how changes in coffee consumption habits, clothing fashions, drug usage, or tire technologies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas reverberate through Latin American commodity chains in profound ways. The social and economic outcomes of the continent’s export experience have been mixed. By analyzing the dynamics of a wide range of commodities over a five-hundred-year period, From Silver to Cocaine highlights this diversity at the same time that it provides a basis for comparison and points to new ways of doing global history.
Contributors. Marcelo Bucheli, Horacio Crespo, Zephyr Frank, Paul Gootenberg, Robert Greenhill, Mary Ann Mahony, Carlos Marichal, David McCreery, Rory Miller, Aldo Musacchio, Laura Nater, Ian Read, Mario Samper, Steven Topik, Allen Wells
Average customer rating:
- a fascinating read on the border and religion
- Belief Matters
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Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (American Encounters/Global Interactions)
Paul J. Vanderwood
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0822334151 |
Book Description
Paul J. Vanderwood offers a fascinating look at the events, beliefs, and circumstances that have motivated popular devotion to Juan Soldado, a Mexican folk saint. In his mortal incarnation, Juan Soldado was Juan Castillo Morales, a twenty-four-year-old soldier convicted of and quickly executed for the rape and murder of eight-year-old Olga Camacho in Tijuana in 1938. Immediately after Morales’s death, many people began to doubt the evidence of his guilt, or at least the justice of his brutal execution. People reported seeing blood seeping from his grave and hearing his soul cry out protesting his innocence. Soon the âmartyredâ Morales was known as Juan Soldado, or John the Soldier. Believing that those who have died unjustly sit closest to God, people began visiting Morales’s grave asking for favors. Within months of his death, the young soldier had become a popular saint. He is not recognized by the Catholic Church, yet thousands of people have made pilgrimages to his gravesite. While Juan Soldado is well known in Tijuana, southern California’s Mexican American community, and beyond, this book is the first to situate his story within a broader exploration of how and why popular canonizations such as his take root and flourish.
In addition to conducting extensive archival research, Vanderwood interviewed central actors in the events of 1938, including Olga Camacho’s mother, citizens who rioted to demand Morales’s release to a lynch mob, those who witnessed his execution, and some of the earliest believers in his miraculous powers. Vanderwood also interviewed many present-day visitors to the shrine at Morales’s grave. He describes them, their petitionsâfor favors such as health, a good marriage, or safe passage into the United Statesâand how they reconcile their belief in Juan Soldado with their Catholicism. Vanderwood puts the events of 1938 within the context of Depression-era Tijuana and he locates people’s devotion, then and now, within the history of extra-institutional religious activity. In Juan Soldado, a gripping true-crime mystery opens up into a much larger and more elusive mystery of faith and belief.
Customer Reviews:
a fascinating read on the border and religion.......2005-02-15
This is an extremely compelling book, especially for an academic monograph. Not only is the story of Juan Soldado and his followers a compelling one, but Vanderwood also paints a vivid picture of society along the US-Mexican border as well. Great for both the general reader and students and professors interested in Mexico, the border, and religiosity.
Belief Matters.......2004-12-09
Vanderwood's book provides a detailed, crackling narrative of a brutal murder-rape in Tijuana in 1938, but also an anatomy of how that famous border-town grew and experienced the agonies of social change during the early twentieth century. The young Mexican soldier executed for the crime is at the center of the story, of course, as are the processes of how he came to be venerated as a sort of folk-saint almost immediately after his death--unsanctified by the official church, but close to the lives and beliefs of Mexicans of many different social backgrounds. Indeed, in many ways the issue of popular religious belief--how it is established, how it flourishes, what it does for people--is at the core of the book. Some of the most moving parts of the story arise with the author's work on the current state of the Juan Soldado cult, his survey research at the site of the shrine in Tijuana, and his fascinating interviews with the present-day Mexicans he met there. The belief in the efficacy of Juan Soldado's intervention with divine forces on behalf of pilgrims to the shrine is quite striking, even if modern secular people themselves find some of the actual belief in miraculous occurrences puzzling. But as Vanderwood has shown, this is a practical, everyday belief-system that helps ordinary people deal with life's problems--love, illness, emigration, economic hardship--in ways that echo the still strong religiosity of Mexicans, no matter whether Juan Soldado was guilty or innocent of the horrendous crime for which his life was taken. This central paradox of the book--that people are not really overly concerned with Juan Soldado's guilt, but with their own consciences, and that they see the basis of the veneration as more a question of repentance and social justice--is what gives the story its power. This is a book well worth reading not only for people interested in the history of Mexico, but also for those who think about the nature of religious belief more generally.
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