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Waste and Wealth: An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy
Waste and Wealth examines questions of value, labor, and morality underlining the translocal waste trading networks originating from a rural district in Vietnam. Considering waste as an economic category of global significance, this book shows migrant laborers' complex negotiations with political economic forces to remake their social and moral lives. It also illuminates how the waste traders seek to construct viable identities in the face of stigmatization, insecurity, and precarity. Waste and Wealth makes an important contribution to global studies of human economies and post-socialist transformations, demonstrating how the forces of globalization blend with local historical-cultural dynamics to shape the valuation of people and things.
Waste and Wealth is a volume in the series ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.
Waste and Wealth is a volume in the series ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.
232 pages, Paperback
Published September 14, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 3, 2020
Such a fascinating ethnography!
December 16, 2022
This book does a good job of picking apart the positive aspects and drawbacks of globalization, especially on its impacts on culture within certain communities. Its strong points are the multiple anecdotes to help the point along. The strong introduction to globalization sets up the information in the book nicely.
It was rather repetitive and circled back to gender in and outside the home on multiple occasions. The idea that gender and space are intertwined is a fascinating one, but the number of times that it was brought up that traditionally women=inside and men=outside was ridiculous.
The one great flaw was that the book did not even actually explain the basics of the waste economy, leaving the reader to piece together precisely the mechanisms of the trade. It also waits like a hundred pages before mentioning that all waste trade is illegal and migrant workers run the risk of getting arrested- even if the cops are known to work very well with bribes. It seems like a big point and it was thrown in as an offhand.
An interesting through point that the book rightfully focuses on is how culture and capitalism clash, and the complex, messy push and pull. The main themes are traditional local and cultural morality, and change- both in culture and in the economy- in a very specific part of the world.
Good book!
It was rather repetitive and circled back to gender in and outside the home on multiple occasions. The idea that gender and space are intertwined is a fascinating one, but the number of times that it was brought up that traditionally women=inside and men=outside was ridiculous.
The one great flaw was that the book did not even actually explain the basics of the waste economy, leaving the reader to piece together precisely the mechanisms of the trade. It also waits like a hundred pages before mentioning that all waste trade is illegal and migrant workers run the risk of getting arrested- even if the cops are known to work very well with bribes. It seems like a big point and it was thrown in as an offhand.
An interesting through point that the book rightfully focuses on is how culture and capitalism clash, and the complex, messy push and pull. The main themes are traditional local and cultural morality, and change- both in culture and in the economy- in a very specific part of the world.
Good book!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews