Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain - Softcover

Narotzky, Susana; Smith, Gavin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520245695 ISBN 13: 9780520245693

Publisher: University of California Press, 2006

Synopsis

This superb historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union’s “Regional Economies,” takes up the difficult question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining rich oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the authors examine the growing divide between government and its citizens in a region that has in the last four decades been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to a primarily industrial one. Offering a new form of ethnography appropriate for the study of suprastate polities and a globalized economy, Immediate Struggles contributes to our understanding of one region as well as the way we think about changing class relations, modes of production, and cultural practices in a newly emerging Europe. The authors also consider how phenomena such as the “informal economy” and “black market” are not marginal to the normal operation of state and economic institutions but are intertwined with both.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"Immediate Struggles is a rich, ethnographically informed analysis of the concept and the historical reality of a 'regional economy' in Spain. It makes a major contribution to our understanding of changing class relations, modes of production, and cultural practices in a newly emerging Europe."―Peter Schneider, co-author of Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo

About the Author

Susana Narotzky, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona in Spain, is author of New Directions in Economic Anthropology among other books. Gavin Smith, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, is author of Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology (1999).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0520245695
• ISBN 13: 9780520245693
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277