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

Online ISBN:
9780520939011
Print ISBN:
9780520245686
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

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

Published:
25 July 2006
Online ISBN:
9780520939011
Print ISBN:
9780520245686
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

This 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 question of how to understand the growing alienation ordinary working people feel in the face of globalization. Combining oral histories with a sophisticated and nuanced structural understanding of changing political economies, the chapters in this book 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 into a primarily industrial one. Offering a form of ethnography appropriate for the study of suprastate polities and a globalized economy, the book 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 chapters 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.

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