Print Price: $50.99

Format:
Paperback
224 pp.
22 illustrations, 137 mm x 208 mm

ISBN-13:
9780190464431

Copyright Year:
2016

Imprint: OUP US

City of Flowers

An Ethnography of Social and Economic Change in Costa Rica's Central Valley

Susan E. Mannon

Series : Issues of Globalization:Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology

City of Flowers is an ethnographic study of social and economic change in Costa Rica. Rather than investigate how macroeconomic forces bear down on workers and households, this book explores how individuals and households give meaning and shape to neoliberalism as it evolves over time. Drawing on twenty years of field work and 100 life histories of people living in one Costa Rican city, the book considers how individuals in four different class locations negotiate the economic changes going on around them. Author Susan E. Mannon argues that these responses are bound up in class, race, and gender aspirations and anxieties.

City of Flowers is a volume in the ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY series, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.

Readership : Undergraduate college students of anthropology, sociology, and Latin American studies.

Reviews

• "The rationale is very appealing. The author presents a very up-to-date subject matter (the impact of neoliberalism on everyday lives), linking this to a core theme in sociology, the "sociological imagination" according to C. Wright Mills. This is a basic concept introduced in almost any introductory social science class, which students should immediately be able to tie to the purpose of the book, and should also make the book's subject matter easy to tie back to other subjects covered in the classroom, for comparison and contrast...The author has an engaging and successful writing style. Each chapter starts off with story-telling and a glimpse into everyday life, before segueing into historical or theoretical details. I have found this story-first approach to be quite effective at getting students interested in a text in the past, and I expect this will make this book very successful in the classroom."
  --Donald Anderson, Pima Community College
  
  
• "As someone who has lived in and visited extended family still living in Heredia for the past forty years, this read was particularly enjoyable and impressive. It is an engagingly written and wonderfully insightful stab at doing what I have long thought is most needed (not just for Costa Rica), i.e. to see from within the realignment of social classes over the past thirty years or so that has generated new livelihoods and consciousness, as well as political tendencies virtually unimaginable before...Her portrait of Heredia rings oh so true time and time again...It delves deeply into complex issues of interest to everyone today, and in a way that is both personally engaging and highly readable."
  --Lowell Gudmundson, Mount Holyoke College
  
  
• "I like the idea of the book and the aim to understand economic change through its impact on ordinary people. I also like the choice of personal biographies. These texts seem to be very effective in undergraduate education. Developing empathy for others is a key way to achieve understanding and personal narratives allow for that."
  --Monica Ricketts, Temple University