Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801446627 ISBN 13: 9780801446627

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Recent changes in the global economy and in Southeast Asian national political economies have led to new forms of commodity production and new commodities. Using insights from political economy and commodity studies, the essays in Taking Southeast Asia to Market trace the myriad ways recent alignments among producers, distributors, and consumers are affecting people and nature throughout the region.

In case studies ranging from coffee and hardwood products to mushroom pickers and Vietnamese factory workers, the authors detail the Southeast Asian articulations of these processes while also discussing the broader implications of these shifts. Taken together, the cases show how commodities illuminate the convergence of changing social forces in Southeast Asia today, as they transform the terms, practices, and experiences of everyday life and politics in the global economy.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Nevins is Associate Professor of Geography at Vassar College and the author of A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor, also from Cornell, among other books. Nancy Lee Peluso is Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the coeditor of Violent Environments, also from Cornell, and the author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java.

Review

"Taking Southeast Asia to Market is a timely theoretical intervention in political ecology, but it is more, too: a sparkling set of reflections on the social production of nature, as well as on nature's products and their transformations. Ranging from jewel mining in Burma to the market for live seafood in Hong Kong, and from Islamic spiritual training for factory workers in Indonesia to mushroom hunters in the Pacific Northwest, these essays never fail to exceed expectations. This is the kind of productive surprise that one finds in the best ethnographic writing, and which is the source of much of ethnography's power."

(Mary Margaret Steedly, Harvard University)

"As one leans on a lovely Indonesian table, slips into a stylish T-shirt, sips a rare arabica coffee, or munches on delicious shrimp, one is in the new circuits of Southeast Asian economies. Most U.S. readers have largely forgotten about this region and hear of it mainly in references to the Vietnam war or threatened tigers. But the region has reconfigured itself, its politics, and its economies in highly complex, often unpredictable ways under this round of neoliberal globalization. Taking Southeast Asia to Market does a superior job of showing how globalization is mediated by local institutions and actors. This is a useful and definitive collection on politics, socionatures, and globalization."

(Susanna Hecht, Professor, Regional and International Development, Institute of the Environment, School of Public Affairs, UCLA)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0801446627
• ISBN 13: 9780801446627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Nevins Joseph, Peluso Nancy Lee