Peasants Against Globalization Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica
- List Price: $40.00
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr
- Publish date: 12/01/1999
Peasants were in the forefront of movements against these cutbacks, marching, blocking highways, and occupying government buildings. In the struggle to preserve their livelihood, the rural poor also formed alliances with wealthy farmers, negotiated with politicians, and embraced and then repudiated charismatic outsiders who came to live among them and to speak in their name. These rural activists combined classbound politics with concerns about threatened peasant identities, practical analysis with sentimentality, grassroots democracy with conspiratorial secrecy, and selfless sacrifice with opportunism.
The small farmers portrayed in this book are worldly, outspoken, exuberant, future-oriented, and fiercely proud. They could hardly be less like the unsophisticated and stoic rustics so prominent in the development literature or those contemporary peasants whose imminent disappearance is endlessly predicted by both right- and left-wing social scientists.
The author argues that the experience of rural activism in Costa Rica in the 1980s and 1990s calls into question much current theory about collective action, peasantries, development, and ethnographic research. The book invites the reader to rethink debates about old and new social movements and to grapple with the ethical andmethodological dilemmas of engaged ethnography.
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