Jade, stone tools, honey and wax, ceramics, rum, land. What gave these commodities value in the Maya world, and how were those values determined? What factors influenced the rise and fall of a commodity’s value? The Value of Things examines the social and ritual value of commodities in Mesoamerica, providing a new and dynamic temporal view of the roles of trade of commodities and elite goods from the prehistoric Maya to the present.
Editors Jennifer P. Mathews and Thomas H. Guderjan begin the volume with a review of the theoretical literature related to the “value of things.” Throughout the volume, well-known scholars offer chapters that examine the value of specific commodities in a broad time frame—from prehistoric, colonial, and historic times to the present. Using cases from the Maya world on both the local level and the macro-regional, contributors look at jade, agricultural products (ancient and contemporary), stone tools, salt, cacao (chocolate), honey and wax, henequen, sugarcane and rum, land, ceramic (ancient and contemporary), and contemporary tourist handicrafts.
Each chapter author looks into what made their specific commodity valuable to ancient, historic, and contemporary peoples in the Maya region. Often a commodity’s worth goes far beyond its financial value; indeed, in some cases, it may not even be viewed as something that can be sold. Other themes include the rise and fall in commodity values based on perceived need, rarity or overproduction, and change in available raw materials; the domestic labor side of commodities, including daily life of the laborers; and relationships between elites and nonelites in production.
Examining, explaining, and theorizing how people ascribe value to what they trade, this scholarly volume provides a rich look at local and regional Maya case studies through centuries of time.
Contributors:
Rani T. Alexander
Dean E. Arnold
Timothy Beach
Briana Bianco
Steven Bozarth
Tiffany C. Cain
Scott L. Fedick
Thomas H. Guderjan
John Gust
Eleanor Harrison-Buck
Brigitte Kovacevich
Samantha Krause
Joshua J. Kwoka
Richard M. Leventhal
Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach
Jennifer P. Mathews
Heather McKillop
Allan D. Meyers
Gary Rayson
Mary Katherine Scott
E. Cory Sills
Phelps Dodge Corporation has shaped the landscape of America from the industrial revolution to the information technology revolution. A name synonymous with copper, Phelps Dodge has grown from a cotton and metal trading firm founded in 1834 to its present position as the world's largest publicly traded copper company.
Carlos Schwantes has written a sweeping corporate history of Phelps Dodge. Using landscape as an organizing concept to underscore the company's impact and accomplishments, he offers a close look at this corporate giant within the context of American technological and social history. In tracing the progress of Phelps Dodge through its 165-year history, Schwantes takes readers from the streets of Bisbee, Arizona, to the boardrooms of New York and Phoenix in order to examine the impact the company has had on the many landscapes in which it figures so prominently. Considering factors ranging from the environment to labor, he examines how Phelps Dodge has influenced, and has been influenced by, such forces as the global economy, technological innovation, urban growth, and social change.
Exhaustively researched and profusely illustrated with over 200 photographs, Vision and Enterprise makes a unique contribution to the history of the United States and the evolution of industry by considering the changing face of labor, the environment, and technology from one dynamic company's point of view.
Winner of the 2022 Edward M. Bruner Book Award
Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration is a lively ethnographic exploration of the world of conservation voluntourism and its engagement with marine and terrestrial biodiversity on the Honduran Bay Island of Utila, located in the ecologically critical Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.
In this highly readable text, anthropologist Keri Vacanti Brondo provides a pioneering theoretical framework that conceptualizes conservation voluntourism as a green industry. Brondo argues that the volunteer tourism industry is the product of coloniality and capitalism that works to produce and sustain an economy of affect while generating inequalities and dispossession. Employing a decolonizing methodology based on landscape assemblage theory, Brondo offers “thinking-like-a-mangrove” to attend to alternative worldings in Utila beyond the hegemonic tourist spectacle–dominated world attached to the volunteer tourism industry. Readers journey through the mangroves and waters alongside voluntourists, iguanas, whale sharks, turtles, lionfish, and islanders to build valuable research experience in environmental management while engaging in affective labor and multispecies relations of care.
Conservation organizations benefit from the financial capital and labor associated with conservation tourism, an industry boosted by social media. This critical work asks us to consider the impacts of this new alternative tourism market, one that relies on the exchange of “affect” with other species. How are human socialities made through interactions with other species? What lives and dies in Utila’s affect economy? Why are some species killable? Who gets to decide?
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