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The Cultural Effects Of The Narcoeconomy In Rural Mexico, James H. Mcdonald Ph.D.

Journal of International and Global Studies

This essay describes the cultural effects of drug trafficking on a town in rural Mexico. A variety of ethnographic scenes reveal the rapidly changing social imagination as new forms of consumption create new opportunities for identity formation. However, because these new consumer forms are expensive, and therefore inaccessible to the majority of community members, a type of cultural exclusion is at work. In this ordinary town, there are extraordinary forms of consumption: large, lavish houses; high-stakes gambling at local cockfights; a new urban-oriented consumer culture; and new farmer entrepreneurs. All were underwritten by narco-activities. These new forms of consumption challenge …

A Transnational Conversation On French Colonialism, Immigration, Violence And Sovereignty, Miriam Ticktin, Ruth Marshall, Paolo Bacchetta

Publications and Research

This conversation was transcribed from a panel discussion that took place at The Scholar & Feminist Conference XXXII, “Fashioning Citizenship: Gender and Immigration,” held on March 24, 2007 at Barnard College.

Writing Identity Into Space: The Relationship Between Ethnography, Autobiography, And Space In Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term And Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, Lawrence Phillips

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From a number of disciplinary perspectives autobiography has always presented a challenge to more or less discrete modes of reading and evaluating the text. To read autobiography as a literary text is to suppress its close relationship to the writer, however fictionalised and evasive the writing subject might be about a textual identity so closely related to his or her public persona. On the other hand, to read it as history or a documentary presentation of a life is to fail to acknowledge the heavy use of literary techniques and imbedded subjectivity that makes autobiography what it is. …