An anthropologist’s investigation of why some Brazilians choose to leave behind a booming economy and return to their villages.

In Return from the World, anthropologist Gregory Duff Morton traces the migrations of Brazilian workers who leave a thriving labor market and return to their home villages to become peasant farmers. Morton seeks to understand what it means to turn one’s back deliberately on the promise of economic growth.

Giving up their positions in factories, at construction sites, and as domestic workers, these migrants travel thousands of miles back to villages without running water or dependable power. There, many take up subsistence farming. Some become activists with the MST, Brazil’s militant movement of landless peasants. Bringing their stories vividly to life, Morton dives into the dreams and disputes at play in finding freedom in the shared rejection of growth.

Gregory Duff Morton is assistant professor at City College of New York, where he teaches anthropology and Latin American studies. This is his first book.

Introduction
1. The Phone Call Home: Forms of Speech in the Growth Process
2. The Roads: Histories of Growth as Histories of Cooperation
3. The Bus Ride: Making and Unmaking Abstract Labor
4. The Cargo: Marketplaces, Labor at a Distance, and Distance from Labor
5. The Money: Asset Chains, Class Consciousness, and the Transfer of Value Out of the City
6. The Things You Hold: Against Saving
Conclusion: Wait for the Coffee
Afterword

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index