A01=Samuel Martinez
Author_Samuel Martinez
Betiz Songs
Cane Cutter
Cane Fields
caribbean
Caribbean Sugar Plantation
Category=JHMC
CEA
Company Bosses
Country Music
dead
Dead Season
dominican
Dominican Republic
Dominican Sugar Industry
electronic media influence
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ethnic Dominicans
ethnographic fieldwork
Ethnological Vision
global commodity chains
Global Economic Periphery
haitian
Haitian Ancestry
Haitian Nationals
Haitian Women
material deprivation in Caribbean plantations
Movimiento De Mujeres
neoliberal reform impacts
Permanent Residents
plantation
poverty coping mechanisms
Rara Band
republic
Se Sa
season
seasonal
social stratification
STD Infection
sugar
Sugar Estates
vodou
Vodou Ceremonies
Wall Hangings
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781594511882
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Oct 2007
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Samuel Martínez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut, is the author of Peripheral Migrants: Haitians and Dominican Republic Sugar Plantations (University of Tennessee Press, 1996).
