Synopses & Reviews
"The idea of fair trade in a global economy is central to contemporary debates over neoliberalism, globalization and the rule of the free market. But what are the coordinates of the fair trade moment; what sort of alternative does it offer for producers and consumers? Daniel Jaffee is at once a fierce proponent of fair trade but also a critical voice. How, he asks, can fair trade coffee be in and against the market? With one foot in the Central American coffee fincas and the other in the intellectual world of Karl Polanyi and his disciples, Daniel Jaffee has on offer a very heady brew.
Brewing Justice is a pioneering study of the variety of fair trade movements; a prospectus for a more radical vision of fair tradeand#151;an alternative sort of market; and a vital contribution to contemporary debates over free trade, the global agro-food system and the so-called 'movement of movements'. A tour de force."and#151;Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
and#147;Daniel Jaffee has done the Fair Trade movement a real service in his meticulous research into the actual effect of Fair Trade on coffee farmers in a group of villages in Oaxaca, Mexico. Up till now the claims of Fair Trade benefits for the producers have been largely based on brief visits and anecdotes, but now there is hard evidence. In analysing the market for Fair Trade he distinguishes clearly between those who wish to break the market, those who would reform the market and those who simply want access to a growing market. But his book will be of great value not only in his conclusions about how Fair Trade can be made fairer, but in extending our understanding of the overwhelming power of the giant corporations in international trade, even seeking to improve their image by cooptation and dilution of the standards when faced by the challenge of Fair Trade.and#8221; and#151;Michael Barratt Brown, author of Fair Trade: Reform and Realities in the International Trading System
"It is possible to establish a global economy that is just, humane, and sustainable. But it will not be easy. The forces favoring injustice, inhumanity, and exploitation are powerful and entrenched. And, for too long, they have been supported by academics and researchers who have not bothered to examine the real costs of globalization on a standard free-trade model, let alone the real opportunities of globalization on an enlightened fair-trade model. Daniel Jaffee breaks new ground with Brewing Justice. His scholarship is stellar. His conclusions are at once realistic and inspiring. In these pages, it is possible to find the roadmap to a new and better global economy. Read them closely, embrace them, and then get to work on building a fair-trade future."and#151;John Nichols, The Nation
"Brewing Justice is an impressive account of the relationships and ethics embedded in fair trade coffee. Engaging the reader in a comparative global ethnography of fair and free trade coffee production, the author evaluates the gains and losses of fair trade for Mexican peasants. Jaffee's unique accomplishment is to show the consuming public how fair trade can be realized through improving the tenuous existence of producers."and#151;Philip McMichael, author of Development and Social Change
"Brewing Justice is at once a sobering account of what the fair trade movement has achieved, and an optimistic statement that only by deepening movements like this one, will society advance in the direction of economic democracy and justice."and#151;Gerardo Otero, professor of sociology and Latin American Studies, Simon Fraser University
"Brewing Justice is not just a study of fair trade coffee. It also provides alternatives to the unfair rules of trade imposed by the WTO. And it shows that we can all play a role in shaping the economy. Drinking coffee is a political act."and#151;Vandana Shiva, author of Earth Democracy
Synopsis
What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporations Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, she shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, Welker turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. Enacting the Corporation demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations withand responsibilities tolocal communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.
Synopsis
Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. It compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system. It concludes by offering recommendations for strengthening and protecting the integrity of fair trade.
Synopsis
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
Synopsis
"Webb Keane's book demonstrates, once again, that nothing illuminates the puzzles of modernity as effectively as cross-cultural studies of colonial encounters. His careful, interdisciplinary, and penetrating analysis of the semiotics of conversion to Dutch Calvinism in the Indonesian island of Sumba and his skillful blending of theological and anthropological issues will make this book a model for studies of religious conversion. It truly deserves a wide readership."and#151;Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differenceand#147;Christian Moderns is a wonderful exploration of the boundaries between material things, words, and agents, and the implications of their separation and interconnection for the master trope of modernity. In a rich and challenging analysis, . . . the book shows how a Christian modernity was negotiated and inhabited. The elaborate care with which Keane argues this thesis is truly impressive. I do not know of any other anthropological book on the same theme that can compare with it.and#8221;and#151;Talal Asad, author of Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
and#147;Christian Moderns is the kind of book every anthropologist would like to have written. Keane moves easily between the large and small picture: modernism, purification, and Protestantism; a religious conversion or the changing value of meat on the Indonesian island of Sumba. In developing a semiotic ideology, he is able to address at once verbal and material culture, ritual speech and exchange, innerness and sincerity, agency, intentionality and fetishism, and the mutual misrecognitions of the missionary and the and#145;pagan.and#8217; I know of no book that is as sensitive to the embedded, the spiritual, conundra, of religious contact and conversion and yet remains rigorous in argument.and#8221;and#151;Vincent Crapanzano, author of Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench
and#147;In this remarkable work, Webb Keane juxtaposes European religious disputes with an ethnographic account of Christian conversion in Indonesia. Abiding dilemmas of western social scienceand#151;he arguesand#151;have their source in language ideologies that anthropologists share with the Protestant missionaries who preceded them. Anxieties about objectification, agency, and the erasure of materiality have been crucial to Calvinism. They are no less central to colonial modernization projects and our own logics of inquiry. In lucid prose, Keane builds a powerful argument about semiosis and material life that is sure to stimulate important debate.and#8221;and#151;Susan Gal, co-author of The Politics of Gender After Socialism
Synopsis
Tobacco War charts the dramatic and complex history of tobacco politics in California over the past quarter century. Beginning with the activities of a small band of activists who, in the 1970s, put forward the radical notion that people should not have to breathe second-hand tobacco smoke, Stanton Glantz and Edith Balbach follow the movement through the 1980s, when activists created hundreds of city and county ordinances by working through their local officials, to the present--when tobacco is a highly visible issue in American politics and smoke-free restaurants and bars are a reality throughout the state. The authors show how these accomplishments rest on the groundwork laid over the past two decades by tobacco control activists who have worked across the U.S. to change how people view the tobacco industry and its behavior.
Tobacco War is accessibly written, balanced, and meticulously researched. The California experience provides a graphic demonstration of the successes and failures of both the tobacco industry and public health forces. It shows how public health advocates slowly learned to control the terms of the debate and how they discovered that simply establishing tobacco control programs was not enough, that constant vigilance was necessary to protect programs from a hostile legislature and governor. In the end, the California experience proves that it is possible to dramatically change how people think about tobacco and the tobacco industry and to rapidly reduce tobacco consumption. But California's experience also demonstrates that it is possible to run such programs successfully only as long as the public health community exerts power effectively. With legal settlements bringing big dollars to tobacco control programs in every state, this book is must reading for anyone interested in battling and beating the tobacco industry.
Synopsis
"Shows how the tobacco industry works behind the scenes . . . to subvert public health and how courageous action by public health advocates beat them back."and#151;C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General of the United States
"This motivating narrative about the victories over Big Tobacco and their political minions by a smart, tough and relentless group of citizens and voluntary agencies in the nation's largest state teaches many lessons for future struggles against the tobacco industry and other corporations that control governments in order to sell harmful products. For citizens who want strategy, inspiration and civic wisdom, for students who want to study how people can win against massive odds, for public health workers who need the courage of their convictions and the resolve of their objectives, Tobacco War by Glantz and Balbach is as complete a menu and map as there is in print."and#151;Ralph Nader
"The man who 'belled the cat' in the 1980s with his annual accounting of tobacco-industry campaign contributions has produced a definitive case study of how special interests manipulate and distort the political process. It should be required reading for all state politicians, if for no other reason than to remind them that there is someone out there watching what they do."and#151;Steve Scott, political editor, California Journal
"Tobacco War is a fascinating, absorbing, and thoroughly documented description of the struggle between the people of California with the tobacco industry and its allies. It is must reading for anyone who wants to know how to win this fight. The final chapter, 'Lessons Learned,' is a gem. The book is not only a wonderful textbook in public health, public policy, and politics, but a great read for the general public."and#151;Philip R. Lee, M.D., Assistant Secretary for Health in the Johnson and Clinton Administrations
About the Author
Stanton A. Glantz is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Among his books are The Cigarette Papers (California, 1996), Tobacco: Biology and Politics (1999), and Primer of Biostatistics (1997). Edith D. Balbach is Director of the Community Health Program at Tufts University.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Note on Pseudonyms and Quoted Sources
Introduction
1. We Need to Newmontize Folk”: A New Social Discipline at Corporate Headquarters
2. Pak Comrel Is Our Regent Whom We Respect:” Mine, State, and Development Responsibility
3. My Job Would Be Far Easier If Locals Were Already Capitalists”: Incubating Enterprise and Patronage
4. We Identified Farmers as Our Top Security Risk”: Ethereal and Material Development in the Paddy Fields
5. Corporate Security Begins in the Community”: The Social Work of Environmental Management
6. We Should Be Like Starbucks”: The Social Assessment
Conclusion. Soft Is Hard”
Notes
Bibliography
Index