Voices from the Global Margin: Confronting Poverty and Inventing New Lives in the Andes

by William P. Mitchell

Winner, LASA Peru Flora Tristán Book Prize from the Peru Section, Latin American Studies Association, 2007 Voices from the Global Margin looks behind the generalities of debates about globalization to explore the personal impact of global forces on the Peruvian poor. In this highly readable ethnography, William Mitchell draws on the narratives of people he has known for forty years, offering deep insight into how they have coped with extreme poverty and rapid population growth—and their creation of new lives and customs in the process. In their own passionate words they describe their struggles to make ends meet, many abandoning rural homes for marginal wages in Lima and the United States. They chronicle their terror during the Shining Path guerrilla war and the government's violent military response. Mitchell's long experience as an anthropologist living with the people he writes about allows him to put the stories in context, helping readers understand the impact of the larger world on individuals and their communities. His book reckons up the human costs of the global economy, urging us to work toward a more just world.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2006

Reviews

[Lauren Lastrapes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mitchell uses individual stories of Peruvian peansants to illuminate economic, ecological and political realities that all poor Peruvians faced between the mid-1960s when he first started doing fieldwork in Peru through 1999 during his last field visit after the Shining Path war had (more or less) ended.