Decency and Excess: Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781594511882)

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.

Author: Samuel Martinez
ISBN-10: 1594511888
ISBN-13: 9781594511882
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 10/30/2007
Pages: 242
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.97h x 6.08w x 0.53d