£191.26

Routledge Decency and Excess: Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation

Price data last checked 25 day(s) ago - will refresh soon

View at Amazon

We'll watch every seller, every day. One email when your price arrives.

It has never been this cheap. We have no record of a lower price.

£191 today · cheaper than every other day in the last 3 months

NEW HERE?

Amazon shows you one price. We show you all of them.

Tosheroon watches Amazon prices so you don't have to. Every product on Amazon has a price history — we make it visible. Set the price you'd actually pay, and we'll email you the second it gets there. No app, no account, one email.

WHAT'S ON THIS PAGE

↓ Price chart
when this has been cheap or pricey
↓ Forecast
where the price is heading next
↓ Statistics
all-time high & low, recent range
↑ Price alert
name your number, we'll email you

Price History & Forecast

Grey patches = out of stock. Cheaper = lower on the chart. Hover for exact prices.

Last 66 days · 66 data points (no recent data)

Historical
Generating forecast…
£191.26 £181.70 £185.52 £189.35 £193.17 £197.00 £200.82 02 May 2026 18 May 2026 03 June 2026 19 June 2026 06 July 2026

Price Distribution

Price distribution over 66 days • 1 price levels

Days at Price
66 days 0 17 33 50 66 £191 Days at Price

Price Analysis

Most common price: £191 (66 days, 100.0%)

Price range: £191 - £191

Price levels: 1 different prices over 66 days

Description

Based on periodic ethnographic fieldwork over a span of fifteen years, Martinez shows how impoverished plantation dwellers find ways of coping with the alienation that would be expected while laboring to produce goods for the richer countries. Despite living in dire poverty, these workers live in a thoroughly commodified social environment. Ritual, eroticism, electronic media, household adornment, payday-weekend "binging" are ways even chronically poor plantation residents dream beyond reality. Yet plantation residents' efforts to live decently and escape from the dead hand of necessity also deepen existing divisions of ethnic identity and status. As the divide between "haves" and "have-nots" worsens as a result of neoliberal reform and the decline of sugar in international markets, this book reveals on an intensely human scale the coarsening of the social fabric of this and other communities of the world's poorer nations. Review “Decency and Excess is a plantation ethnography comparable in terms of richness of observational detail with some of the best examples of this genre. But it also engages a set of concerns that never prominently figured on the agenda of classic Caribbean ethnographies: on the one hand, the study of consumption, and, on the other hand, a theoretical discourse that aims to track the emergence of flourishing local economies of the occult amidst the increasingly ‘occult’ workings of neoliberal global capitalism. Finding an unlikely ally in Georges Bataille, whose theories of expenditure, for Martínez, capture some of the tragic ironies of the consumer cultures developed by the severely exploited and radically impoverished, Martínez traces the contours of a fresh and potentially highly significant critique of capitalism emerging from an unexpected location: that of an eroticization of waste, rather than the fetishization of objectified value. Decency and Excess presents considerable challenges that will be noted not just in Caribbean studies but the anthropology of material culture and consumption, and―one would hope―in the discipline at large.” ―Stephan Palmie, University of Chicago “In this ethnography Martínez convinces us to care about the fate of Monte Coca, a gritty sugar cane plantation community in the Dominican Republic, a place that no one calls home and that no one will mourn as globalization renders it obsolete. We come to empathize with the cane workers’ struggles for dignity, even though these struggles engender invidious distinctions as much as solidarity, ephemeral relief rather than resistance or hopes for transformation. Finely tuned to meaning and materiality, to everyday practices and global processes, Martínez has made a prescient, masterful case for the return of political economy, back from its banishment to the margins of anthropological theory.” ―Charles R. Hale, President, Latin American Studies Association (May 2006–October 2007) and Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin About the Author Samuel Martínez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut, is the author of Peripheral Migrants: Haitians and Dominican Republic Sugar Plantations (University of Tennessee Press, 1996).

Product Specifications

Format
hardcover
Domain
Amazon UK
Release Date
15 March 2006
Listed Since
02 February 2007

Barcode

No barcode data available

Similar Products You Might Like

Routledge Migrant and Tourist Encounters - Dominican and Cuban Cultures
96% match

Routledge Migrant and Tourist Encounters - Dominican and Cuban Cultures

Routledge

£139.12 15 Jul 2026
On the Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography): 4
95% match

On the Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography): 4

Liverpool University Press

£96.69 14 Jul 2026
On the Periphery of the Periphery: Household Archaeology at Hacienda San Juan Bautista Tabi, Yucatán, Mexico: 3 (Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology)
95% match

On the Periphery of the Periphery: Household Archaeology at Hacienda San Juan Bautista Tabi, Yucatán, Mexico: 3 (Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology)

Springer

£76.41 07 Jul 2026
Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human
95% match

Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human

Fordham University Press

£88.44 04 Jul 2026
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean: Ways of Being Non/Sovereign (Critical Caribbean Studies)
95% match

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean: Ways of Being Non/Sovereign (Critical Caribbean Studies)

Rutgers University Press

£89.62 03 Jul 2026
Haiti and the Americas (Caribbean Studies Series)
95% match

Haiti and the Americas (Caribbean Studies Series)

University Press of Mississippi

£58.39 13 Jul 2026
The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century (The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World)
95% match

The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century (The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World)

University of South Carolina Press

£51.95 29 Jun 2026
Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture: 60 (Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, 60)
95% match

Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture: 60 (Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature, 60)

RODOPI

£63.81 03 Jul 2026
Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs
95% match

Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs

Rutgers University Press

£88.42 09 Jul 2026
Sklavenaufstände in der Literatur: Les Révoltes d‘esclaves dans la littérature
95% match

Sklavenaufstände in der Literatur: Les Révoltes d‘esclaves dans la littérature

J.B. Metzler

£49.33 13 Jul 2026
Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism (After the Empire: The Francophone World & Postcolonial France)
95% match

Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism (After the Empire: The Francophone World & Postcolonial France)

Lexington Books

£71.34 08 Jul 2026
Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900-1921 (Princeton Legacy Library): 2222
95% match

Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900-1921 (Princeton Legacy Library): 2222

Princeton University Press

£74.23 06 Jul 2026
Free Communities of Color and the Revolutionary Caribbean: Overturning, or Turning Back?
95% match

Free Communities of Color and the Revolutionary Caribbean: Overturning, or Turning Back?

Routledge

£111.28 10 Jul 2026
The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (Francophone Postcolonial Studies): 7
95% match

The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative (Francophone Postcolonial Studies): 7

Liverpool University Press

£95.74 14 Jul 2026
The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction
95% match

The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction

Duke University Press

£62.11 09 Jul 2026
Racialism, Drugs, and Migration: Contemporary Issues in Latin America and the Caribbean
95% match

Racialism, Drugs, and Migration: Contemporary Issues in Latin America and the Caribbean

Cognella Academic Publishing

£97.45 15 Jul 2026
Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in Between (Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series)
95% match

Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in Between (Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series)

University of Florida Press

£76.20 09 Jul 2026
Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century
95% match

Amsterdam's Sephardic Merchants and the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the Seventeenth Century

MACMILLAN

£79.85 29 Jun 2026
Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood (After the Empire: The Francophone World & Postcolonial France)
95% match

Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood (After the Empire: The Francophone World & Postcolonial France)

Lexington Books

£80.34 14 Jul 2026
The Atlantic in World History, 1490-1830
95% match

The Atlantic in World History, 1490-1830

Bloomsbury

£75.00 09 Jul 2026
The Contemporary Caribbean: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities (Central America and the Caribbean)
95% match

The Contemporary Caribbean: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities (Central America and the Caribbean)

£183.87 26 Jun 2026
Routledge EU and CARICOM - Law and Economics Book
95% match

Routledge EU and CARICOM - Law and Economics Book

Routledge

£138.01 16 Jul 2026
Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic
94% match

Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic

University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications

£39.15 26 Jun 2026
The Poet's Prose and Other Essays: Race, National Identity, and Diaspora in the Americas
94% match

The Poet's Prose and Other Essays: Race, National Identity, and Diaspora in the Americas

Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

£50.09 02 Jul 2026