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The authors trace the evolution of Costa Rican culture and institutions from pre-Columbian times through the late 1990s. Particularly concerned with the change wrought by the economic crisis of the 1980s, they base their portrayal on interviews with Costa Ricans; observations of many facets--from coffee plantation work to the deliberations of the Legislature; and readings of journalists, essayists, poets, historians, and others. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In recent debates over poverty and development, notions of worth, dignity, and human rights have come to the forefront. This publication addresses the link between the theoretical notion of dignity as a social primary good and its material expressions in daily life from comparative social anthropological and historical perspectives. The empirical analysis is based on over one hundred in-depth interviews with lone mothers living in different cultural settings in Costa Rica. In addition, a unique and innovative national social policy measure aimed at promoting dignity and self-worth as a means to exit poverty and secure sustainable development is assessed.
This four-volume encyclopedia set offers coverage of all aspects of human rights theory, practice, law, and history.
Costa Rica is a country known internationally for its eco-credentials, dazzling coastlines, and reputation as one of the happiest and most peaceful nations on earth. Beneath this façade, however, lies an exclusionary rhetoric of nationalism bound up in the concept of the tico, as many Costa Ricans refer to themselves. Beginning by considering the very idea of national identity and what this constitutes, this book explores the nature of the idealised tico identity, demonstrating the ways in which it has assumed a white supremacist, Central Valley-centric, patriarchal, heteronormative stance based on colonial ideals. Chapters two and three then go on to consider the literature and films produ...
In the late nineteenth century, migrants from Jamaica, Colombia, Barbados, and beyond poured into Caribbean Central America, building railroads, digging canals, selling meals, and farming homesteads. On the rain-forested shores of Costa Rica, U.S. entrepreneurs and others established vast banana plantations. Over the next half-century, short-lived export booms drew tens of thousands of migrants to the region. In Port Limn, birthplace of the United Fruit Company, a single building might house a Russian seamstress, a Martinican madam, a Cuban doctor, and a Chinese barkeep--together with stevedores, laundresses, and laborers from across the Caribbean. Tracing the changing contours of gender, ki...
Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In add...
The troubled history of democracy in Latin America has been the subject of much scholarly commentary. This volume breaks new ground by systematically exploring the linkages among the historical legacies of large landholding patterns, agrarian class relations, and authoritarian versus democratic trajectories in Latin American countries. The essays address questions about the importance of large landownders for the national economy, the labor needs and labor relations of these landowners, attempts of landowners to enlist the support of the state to control labor, and the democratic forms of rule in the twentieth century.
The Legacy of the Filibuster War: National Identity and Collective Memory in Central America analyzes the development of the Filibuster War as a symbol of Costa Rican national identity and presents several challenges to traditional theories of modernization and the creation of nationalism. By focusing on the development of cultural features defined by the transformation of collective memory, Marco Cabrera Geserick argues that national identity is a dynamic process defined according to local, national, and international contexts. Modernization theories connect the creation of symbols of official nationalism with the period of consolidation of the nation-state, yet the Filibuster War started its rise to Costa Rican national identity years later. Cabrera Geserick analyzes the threats to sovereignty and imperialist advances that served to promote the memory of the Filibuster War, while local social transformations—such as the abolition of the army, the rise of popular forces, and internal political conflict—have continued to force drastic changes on the interpretation of the war.