Everyday Moral Economies E-Book

Marisa Wilson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 474

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Offering a rare glimpse of rural life in modern-day Cuba, this book examines how ordinary Cubans carve out their own spaces for ‘appropriate’ acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.

• Discusses the conflict between the socialist-welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity
• Bridges the fields of human geography and anthropology
• Approaches food networks and the scale of food systems in a novel way
• Provides a comprehensive look at Cuba today, with coverage of history, politics, economics, and social and environmental justice
• Enhanced by vivid photos from the field

Leseprobe

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface

Preface

Crossovers in anthropology and geography I

Caveats and limitations

Notes

References

Acknowledgements

Acronyms

Chapter One: Introduction

Political economies: re-connecting ‘is’ and ‘ought’

Shifting scales of responsibility

Crossovers in anthropology and geography II

The economy–culture relation

Positioning the ethnographer I: habitual and representational knowledge

Positioning the ethnographer II: food and the ‘politics of negotiation’

The provisioning perspective

Outline of the chapters

Notes

References

Chapter Two: The Historical Emergence of a National Leviathan

The first revolution ‘of the humble, for the humble and by the humble’

José Martí and contradictions of Cuba’s creation myth

Town and country in the early republic: pre-revolutionary values of commodities and culture, work and reciprocity

Agrarianism, Guevara and the Great Debate

Pendulum shifts and moral continuities

Notes

References

Chapter Three: Scarcities, Uneven Access and Local Narratives of Consumption

The ideal of national re-distribution and the reality of uneven access

Local narratives of consumption and the Fight

Notes

References

Chapter Four: Changing Landscapes of Care: Re-distributions and Reciprocities in the World of Tutaño Consumption

Reciprocity and re-distribution: a comparative view

Merit and nourishment

‘Hunger’ in post-1990s Tuta: means testing for food and energy

Hunger and need

Continuities and change in the social contract

Notes

References

Chapter Five: Localizing the Leviathan: Hierarchies and Exchanges that Connect State, Market and Civil Society

Institutions and ideologies of the national moral economy

Shifting scales of appropriate exchange

Conclusion

Notes

References

Chapter Six: The Scalar Politics of Sustainability: Transforming the Small Farming Sector

Food and other ‘sovereignties’ in Cuba

Positioning small farmers in Cuba: the agroecology movement in historical context

Controlling the mercenary, designating the worthy: small farming and national institutions

Shifting borders of Cuban agroecology

Notes

References

Chapter Seven: Conclusion

Alternative economic geographies and systems of provisioning: contributions and possibilities

Towards value pluralism

Notes

References

Appendix 1: Key Political Economic Events of the Cuban Revolution

Appendix 2: Daily Nutritional Requirements in Cuba

Appendix 3: Institutional Levels for National Food Provisioning

Appendix 4: Monthly Food Rations per Person

Appendix 5: Weekly Household Food Purchases

Appendix 6: The Cuban Urban Agriculture Programme

Index

RGS-IBG Book Series

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Marisa L. (Marisa Lauren), 1979–Everyday moral economies: food, politics and scale in Cuba / Marisa Wilson.pages cm – (RGS-IBG book series)Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-30200-2 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-118-30192-0 (paper)1. Food supply – Social aspects – Cuba. 2. Food supply – Economic aspects – Cuba.3. Consumption (Economics) – Cuba. 4. Exchange – Cuba. 5. Value. 6. Cuba –Economic conditions – 1990–. I. Everyday moral economies.HD9014.C92W55 2014338.1′97291—dc23

2013018233

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: ‘The hand is that of a woman farmer in her mid-60s, who requested that the photo be taken as a symbol of “a real worker in Cuba”. As she told me, “you can always tell a campesino [farmer] by their hands”.’ © Marisa WilsonCover design by Workhaus.

For my parents

Series Editors’ Preface

The RGS-IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:

www.rgsbookseries.com

Neil CoeNational University of SingaporeJoanna BullardLoughborough University, UKRGS-IBG Book Series Editors

Preface

¡Con lo que un yanqui ha gastadono más que en comprar botellasse hubiera Juana curado! …With what a Yankee spendsJust buying bottles,Juana could have been cured! …

                                   Nicolas Guillén (from the poem, Visita á un solar, 1930)1

This book is about the relationship between provisioning and politics. To be clear, politics is understood in terms of values, economic or otherwise. In this sense, politics is ‘less about the struggle to appropriate value (or freedom to create/accumulate value), but the struggle to establish what value is (or the freedom to decide what makes life worth living)’ (Graeber 2001: 88). I am concerned with values and their spatio-temporal dimensions, like nationalism or economic globalization, and with the way associated values are evidenced in moral ideas and practices that shape everyday life.

In the above verses, for example, there are two values of beer: the first is the market value paid for by tourists from the United States, the second, the social value of finding a cure for Juana (a poor woman from rural Cuba). As the poem suggests, in the 1930s ordinary Cubans saw the two forms of value as commensurable; ‘Yankees’ did not. Since then, contradictions between social values and market values have become even more pronounced, associated with incessant bi-polar discourses of liberalism and socialism. As I will argue, each discourse is tied to particular temporalities and spatialities, becoming what I call Leviathans2 that frame the material and ideational spaces in which ordinary people in Cuba claim their rights and entitlements.

Officially if not always empirically, values set by markets such as price stand in direct contrast to welfare values such as the grand narrative of Cuban socialism, according to which necessities such as food are considered human rights, distinct from the world of commodities. In this normative scheme, basic foodstuffs should be accessible to all needy Cubans in domestic currency, pesos, though more desirable items may only be available in hard currency (or in equivalent peso prices). The traditional planned economy of Cuba is based on a model that treats the nation as one socialist enterprise, whose ultimate aim is not profit (surplus value) but to ensure alimentary and other needs (social values) of the national community. The scalar project of Cuban nationhood, which controls and rationalizes collective forms of provisioning, and the global political economy that gives some Cubans more options than others, are practical effects of these contrasting normative and material systems, the one that privileges the sovereign nation, the other, the sovereign consumer. This book reveals how people in rural Cuba rationalize the practicalities of living in this contradictory moral and political economic world, in which both national and supranational norms influence rather than determine a more localized politics of value-making.

It was this interest in the relation between values and experience, and in the moralities, materialties and spatialities of this relation, that first motivated me to write this book. My own concern with food politics developed when I spent time in Cuba observing and often living through Cubans’ daily ‘fight’ () to provision food for their families. As an ethnographic researcher, my analysis had to start with the ‘concrete conditions which stimulate interest in some abstract problems rather than others’ (Hart 1986: 637), and so naturally I focused on the main concern of the people under study: food. As someone from a country with much influence over the global political economy of food, the topic of food politics was also personal.