Immediate Struggles People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain [Paperback]

This superb historical and ethnographic study of the political economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Unions Regional Economies, takes up the difficult question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining rich oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the authors examine the growing divide between government and its citizens in a region that has in the last four decades been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to a primarily industrial one. Offering a new form of ethnography appropriate for the study of suprastate polities and a globalized economy,Immediate Strugglescontributes to our understanding of one region as well as the way we think about changing class relations, modes of production, and cultural practices in a newly emerging Europe. The authors also consider how phenomena such as the informal economy and black market are not marginal to the normal operation of state and economic institutions but are intertwined with both.

Susana Narotzky, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona in Spain, is author ofNew Directions in Economic Anthropologyamong other books.Gavin Smith, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, is author ofConfronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology(1999).

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Dramatis Personae

1. Toward an Anthropological Framework
for Studying Contemporary Europe
Part I. Conflicting Histories
2. The Histories of the Regional Political Economy
3. Regulating Social Life through Uncertainty and Fear
4. From Insecurity to Dependency
5. From Insecurity to Movement
Part II. Regional Capitalism
6. Families and Entrepreneurs
7. Flel"