Understanding Commodity Cultures Explorations in Economic Anthropology with Case Studies from Mexico

by Cook, Scott

• ISBN13: 9780742534919
• ISBN10: 074253491X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-07-29
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

This book explores how lived experience is informed by and shapes the diversifying funds of knowledge that enable people under economic stress to make culturally-informed choices in their material interest. By selectively reviewing the economic anthropological record and critically examining specific studies in several of Mexico's (and Guatemala's) key regions, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the new trans-border space in the U.S. and Canada for Mexican migrant labor, the author encourages readers to critically rethink their views of economic otherness in Mexico (and, by extension, elsewhere in Latin America and the Third World), and presents a new framework for reconciling the continuing attraction of concepts like 'penny capitalism' with the realities of a world ever more subjected to continental and global market projects of 'Dollar Capitalism'. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Author Biography

Scott Cook is professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(266)
1 Economic Otherness South of the Border: The Twentieth-Century Foundations and Formation of the Economic Anthropology of Mexico	19	(22)
2 Commodity Culture(s), Capitalism, and the Economic Anthropology of Mexico: The Case of B. Traven	41	(24)
3 Rereading Penny Capitalism: The Paradox of Poverty in a Land of Enterprise	65	(22)
4 Rereading Canonical Texts and Revisiting the "Great Debate": A Retrospective View from the Trenches through a Twenty-First-Century Lens	87	(34)
5 Commodity Value, Culture, and Economy	121	(34)
6 Understanding Peasants, Commodity Economy, and Change in the Mesoamerican Experience	155	(24)
7 Commodity Culture(s), Livelihood Strategies, and Reproductive Goals: A Critique of Ethnography	179	(36)
8 Social Reproduction of Commodity Value: Mapping Interior and Exterior Connections	215	(32)
9 The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Commodity Culture(s), Labor, and Capital	247	(20)
10 The New Transborder Space: NAFTAmerica, Migration, and Identity	267	(30)
Afterword: Commodity Culture(s), Economic Value, and the Future	297	(10)
Bibliography	307	(26)
Index	333	(16)
About the Author	349