In this book distinguished anthropologist June Nash demonstrates how ethnography can illuminate a wide array of global problems. She describes encounters with an urban U.S. community undergoing de-industrialization, with Mandalay rice cultivators accommodating to post-World War II independence through animistic pratices, with Mayans mobilizing for autonomy, and with Andean peasants and miners confronting the International Monetary Fund. Havin worked in a great variety of cultural settings around the world, Nash challenges us to expand our anthropological horizons and to think about local problems in a global manner.
June C. Nash is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and City College. She is the author of In the Eyes of the Ancestors: Belief and Behavior in a Mayan Community; We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Mining Communities; and a family autobiography with Juan Rojas, I Spent My Life in the Mines. As a result of her engagement with feminist and working class movements, she has also co-edited with Helen Safa Sex and Class in Latin America, and Women and Change in Latin America; with M. Patricia Fernandez Kelly, Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor; and authored From Tank Town to High Tech: The Clash of Community and Industrial Cycles.
Table of Contents
4 Part I: Paradigms and Postures 5 When Isms Become Wasms: Paradigms Lost and Regained 6 The Notion of the Limited Good and the Specter of the Unlimited Good 7 Women in Between: Globalization and the New Enlightenment 8 Part II: Reflections in the Ethnographic Mirror 9 Multiple Perspectives on Burmese Buddhism and Nat Worship 10 Part III: Engagement in Social Movements Today 11 Social Movements in Global Circuits 12 Part IV: The Hobbesian World of Terror and Violence 13 The Export of Militarization: Counterinsurgency Warfare in the Periphery 14 At Home with the Military-Industrial Complex 15 The Limits of Naivete in Anthropological Fieldwork: The 1954 U.S. Instigated Coup in Guatemala 15 Interpreting Social Movements: Bolivian Resistance to Economic Conditions Imposed by the IMF
