Overview
This book takes a surprising look at the hidden world of broccoli, connecting American consumers concerned about their health and diet with Maya farmers concerned about holding onto their land and making a living. Compelling life stories and rich descriptions from ethnographic fieldwork among supermarket shoppers in Nashville, Tennessee and Maya farmers in highland Guatemala bring the commodity chain of this seemingly mundane product to life. For affluent Americans, broccoli fits into everyday concerns about eating right, being healthy, staying in shape, and valuing natural foods. For Maya farmers, this new export crop provides an opportunity to make a little extra money in difficult, often risky circumstances. Unbeknownst to each other, the American consumer and the Maya farmer are bound together in webs of desire and material production.
Full Product Details
Author: Edward F. Fischer ,
Peter Benson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.30cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.308kg
ISBN: 9780804754842
ISBN 10: 0804754845
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 13 June 2006
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.
Reviews
Broccoli and Desire is written in an honest, engaged, and straightforward manner by good ethnographers; Fischer and Benson are constantly pointing out the contrasts and contradictions in content and tone of informant's testimonies. -- Anthropos
For once, here is a well-researched book with an arresting title that actually delivers what it promises: fresh, new, outside-the-box thinking on a region that has been well studied. In Broccoli and Desire , Fischer and Benson use the deceptively simple question, how the Maya want, as a tool to break down globalization and other political-economy issues. In seeking to show why growing broccoli for export is both dangerous and compelling for Maya farmers, the authors have given us a compelling product--a ground-breaking study that is engagingly written and innovative in its conception. --Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University
Author Information
Edward F. Fischer is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies at Vanderbilt University. His publications include Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala (1996), Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice (2001), and Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Global and Local Context (2002). Peter Benson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.
