[URBANTH-L] BOOK: Narotzky, "Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain"

[Benito Vergara]

The University of California Press  is pleased to announce the publication of:

Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain

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

http://go.ucpress.edu/Narotzky

"_Immediate Struggles_ is a rich, ethnographically informed analysis
of the concept and the historical reality of a 'regional economy' in
Spain."-Peter Schneider, co-author of _Reversible Destiny: Mafia,
Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo_


This superb historical and ethnographic study of the political
economy of the Vega Baja region of Spain, one of the European Union's
"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 Struggles _contributes 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.

Full information about the book, including the table of contents, is
available online: http://go.ucpress.edu/Narotzky