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In the Andean city of Otavalo, Ecuador, a cultural renaissance is now taking place against a backdrop of fading farming traditions, transnational migration, and an influx of new consumer goods. Recently, Otavalenos have transformed their textile trade into a prosperous tourist industry, exporting colorful weavings around the world. Tracing the connections among newly invented craft traditions, social networks, and consumption patterns, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld highlights the way ethnic identities and class cultures materialize in a sensual world that includes luxurious woven belts, powerful stereos, and garlic roasted cuyes (guinea pigs). Yet this case reaches beyond the Andes. He shows how local and global interactions intensify the cultural expression of the world's emerging "native middle classes," at times leaving behind those unable to afford the new trappings of indigenous identity. Colloredo-Mansfeld also comments on his experiences working as an artist in Otavalo. His drawings, along with numerous photographs, animate this engaging study in economic anthropology.
What happens to skilled craftsmen when global trade brings cheap mass-produced goods to market? Economic anthropologists have been wondering and worrying about the fate of artisans and their crafts for decades. In "Fast, Easy, and In Cash," veteran ethnographers Jason Antrosio and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld show how disruptive to local economies global capitalism has been, but they also shed light on what it takes to survive as an artisan amid intense competition. Using lively and often surprising examples from collaborative research in Ecuador and Columbia, they describe the time-tested tactics small-batch producers have used to sustain their livelihoods and foster distinctively indigenous for...
In this ambitious and sophisticated work, anthropologist Michael Ralph uses the case of Senegal often held to be an exceptional democracy in Africato illustrate the mechanisms of credit and debt enforcement common to the emergence of all nation-states. Each chapter systematically addresses various pillars of what are termed the structures of liability, thereby managing to convey the idea that senses of belonging and exclusion i.e. citizenship, are as influenced by the economic sphere as the supposedly distinct cultural one. Ralph then goes beyond this and attaches it to the national level, i.e. sovereignty, as well, asserting that diplomatic standing in the arena of nation-states is also tie...
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Lord Pratt tells the story of the country houses that crown the rolling hills of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, immersing us in the vanished world of these countries' aristocracies. A comprehensive analysis of where politics, culture, and art merge, The Great Country Houses of the Czech Republic and Slovakia is a captivating read for anyone curious about the history and architecture of these two countries. Gerhard Trumler's striking photographs allow readers entrance, for example, to the Liechtensteins' twin chateaux of Valtice and Lednice in the Czech Republic. The lords of these castles established one of the greatest art collections in the world and played a major role in the diplomatic...
Fragments of culture often become commodities when the tourism and heritage business showcases local artistic and cultural practice. And frequently, this industry develops without the consent of those whose culture is commercialized. What does this say about appropriation, social responsibility, and intercultural relationships? And what happens when communities become more involved in this cultural marketplace? Incorporating Culture examines how Indigenous artists and entrepreneurs are cultivating more equitable relationships with the companies that reproduce their designs on everyday objects, slowly modifying a capitalist market to make room for Indigenous values and principles. Moving beyond an interpretation of cultural commodification as necessarily exploitative, Solen Roth discusses how communities can treat culture as a resource in a way that nurtures rather than depletes it. She deftly illustrates the processes by which Indigenous people have been asserting control over the Northwest Coast art industry by reshaping it to reflect local models of property, relationships, and economics.