“The book will be of interest to geographers engaged in debates on diverse economies, as well as those pursuing work on food security, food sovereignty, and/or the politics of food.” (The Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien, 25 October 2015)
“If I had to evaluate Everyday moral economies in just two words, these would most probably be ‘useful’ and ‘balanced’. Useful because to my knowledge it is the most comprehensive treatment on the theme of food consumption and production in Cuba, providing valuable information on the theme from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Balanced because, although it deals with an utterly political side of Cuba and the Revolution, it does not hastily take sides between a (neo)liberal or a socialist mode of production and political organization.” (Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23.3, 4 August 2017)
“Wilson provides a hugely important corrective to our tendency to take for granted the dominant systems of food production, exchange and consumption. Her ethnographic account of how ordinary Cubans live and link two coeval economic systems helps us to appreciate the underlying scales and values that all economic systems express. An excellent combination of the best of anthropology and human geography.”
―Daniel Miller, Professor of Material Culture, University College London
“Everyday Moral Economies is a fascinating study of food provisioning and the creation of value in contemporary Cuba. Skilfully combining a geographical understanding of the politics of scale with an anthropological sensitivity to the vicissitudes of daily life, Marisa Wilson reveals how the contradictions between food-as-commodity (within globalised neoliberal markets) and food-as-entitlement (with a socialist planned economy) are resolved in everyday social practice.”
―Peter Jackson, Professor of Human Geography, University of Sheffield
From the Inside Flap
If one way of defining our global community is a shared consumer culture, then most Cubans are on the outside looking in. Inclusions and exclusions in the world of Cuban consumption are rationalized from without in terms of market inefficiencies, and from within in terms of nationalist and socialist discourses. This book examines how ordinary people in Cuba carve out their own spaces for ‘appropriate’ acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.
Using food as a lens, Marisa Wilson uncovers the moral, ecological, political, and economic issues that Cubans in a rural town face on a daily basis – particularly disjunctures between the socialist-welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity. The book provides an important perspective on how ‘alternative’ projects to resist or counteract mainstream economies depend on their ability to ‘jump scale’ from local perspectives to wider normative and political economic relations, and back. Bridging the fields of geography and anthropology, this is a rare glimpse of everyday life in rural Cuba and of the complex political and economic negotiations ordinary people make in their daily ‘struggle’ to sustain themselves.
From the Back Cover
If one way of defining our global community is a shared consumer culture, then most Cubans are on the outside looking in. Inclusions and exclusions in the world of Cuban consumption are rationalized from without in terms of market inefficiencies, and from within in terms of nationalist and socialist discourses. This book examines how ordinary people in Cuba carve out their own spaces for ‘appropriate’ acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.
Using food as a lens, Marisa Wilson uncovers the moral, ecological, political, and economic issues that Cubans in a rural town face on a daily basis – particularly disjunctures between the socialist-welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity. The book provides an important perspective on how ‘alternative’ projects to resist or counteract mainstream economies depend on their ability to ‘jump scale’ from local perspectives to wider normative and political economic relations, and back. Bridging the fields of geography and anthropology, this is a rare glimpse of everyday life in rural Cuba and of the complex political and economic negotiations ordinary people make in their daily ‘struggle’ to sustain themselves.
About the Author
Marisa Wilson is a social anthropologist and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. Her present research involves political and moral economies of food and (un)sustainable consumption, especially in relation to uneven processes of globalization and neoliberalization in the Caribbean. She has published in both geography and anthropology journals, including Food, Culture and Society, the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, the International Journal of Cuban Studies, and the Journal of Rural and Community Development.
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