Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba

by Marisa Wilson

Overview

Offering a rare glimpse of rural life in modern-day Cuba, this book examines how ordinary Cubans carve out their own spaces for ‘appropriate’ acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.

• Discusses the conflict between the socialist-welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity
• Bridges the fields of human geography and anthropology
• Approaches food networks and the scale of food systems in a novel way
• Provides a comprehensive look at Cuba today, with coverage of history, politics, economics, and social and environmental justice
• Enhanced by vivid photos from the field

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781118302026
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	09/23/2013
Series:	RGS-IBG Book Series
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Marisa Wilson is a social anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. Her present research involves political and moral economies of food and (un)sustainable consumption, especially in relation to uneven processes of globalization and neoliberalization in the Caribbean. She has published in both geography and anthropology journals, including Food, Culture and Society, the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and the Journal of Rural and Community Development.

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Table of Contents

Series Editors’ Preface ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xxiii

List of Acronyms xxv

1 Introduction 1

2 The Historical Emergence of a National Leviathan 33

3 Scarcities, Uneven Access and Local Narratives of Consumption 73

4 Changing Landscapes of Care: Re-distributions and Reciprocities in the World of Tutaño Consumption 99

5 Localizing the Leviathan: Hierarchies and Exchanges that Connect State, Market and Civil Society 121

6 The Scalar Politics of Sustainability: Transforming the Small Farming Sector 153

7 Conclusion 181

Appendices 199

Index 211

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Wilson provides a hugely important corrective to our tendency to take for granted the dominant systems of food production, exchange and consumption. Her ethnographic account of how ordinary Cubans live and link two coeval economic systems helps us to appreciate the underlying scales and values that all economic systems express. An excellent combination of the best of anthropology and human geography."
—Daniel Miller, Professor of Material Culture, University College London

"Everyday Moral Economies is a fascinating study of food provisioning and the creation of value in contemporary Cuba. Skilfully combining a geographical understanding of the politics of scale with an anthropological sensitivity to the vicissitudes of daily life, Marisa Wilson reveals how the contradictions between food-as-commodity (within globalised neoliberal markets) and food-as-entitlement (with a socialist planned economy) are resolved in everyday social practice."
—Peter Jackson, Professor of Human Geography, University of Sheffield

Editorial Reviews

The book will be of interest to geographers engaged in debates on diverse economies, as well as those pursuing work on food security, food sovereignty, and/or the politics of food.”  (The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, 25 October 2015)

“If I had to evaluate Everyday moral economies in just two words, these would most probably be ‘useful’ and ‘balanced’. Useful because to my knowledge it is the most comprehensive treatment on the theme of food consumption and production in Cuba, providing valuable information on the theme from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Balanced because, although it deals with an utterly political side of Cuba and the Revolution, it does not hastily take sides between a (neo)liberal or a socialist mode of production and political organization.” (Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23.3, 4 August 2017)

 

From the Publisher