Results by title

In 1979, toward the end of the Cold War era, Nicaragua's Sandinista movement emerged on the world stage claiming to represent a new form of socialism. Gendered Scenarios of Revolution is a historical ethnography of Sandinista state formation from the perspective of El Tule-a peasant village that was itself thrust onto a national and international stage as a "model" Sandinista community. This book follows the villagers´ story as they joined the Sandinista movement, performed revolution before a world audience, and grappled with the lessons of this experience in the neoliberal aftermath.

Employing an approach that combines political economy and cultural analysis, Montoya argues that the Sandinistas collapsed gender contradictions into class ones, and that as the Contra War exacerbated political and economic crises in the country, the Sandinistas increasingly ruled by mandate as vanguard party instead of creating the participatory democracy that they professed to work toward. In El Tule this meant that even though the Sandinistas created new roles and possibilities for women and men, over time they upheld pre-revolutionary patriarchal social structures. Yet in showing how the revolution created opportunities for Tuleños to assert their agency and advance their interests, even against the Sandinistas´ own interests, this book offers a reinterpretation of the revolution´s supposed failure.

Examining this community’s experience in the Sandinista and post-Sandinista periods offers perspective on both processes of revolutionary transformation and their legacies in the neoliberal era. Gendered Scenarios of Revolution will engage graduate and undergraduate students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, and women’s and gender studies, and appeal to anyone interested in modern revolution and its aftermath.

In recent years, sustainable development has emerged as a central goal of the World Bank and grassroots activists alike. In Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central America, Lynn R. Horton explores the implications of this new, often contested discourse and related policies for Central America's rural and indigenous poor. Drawing on the testimony of leaders and residents of three communities in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, Horton explores grassroots assumptions, values, and practices of sustainable development and, in particular, the ways in which they overlap with or challenge international financial institutions' discourse of sustainability.

With a comparative, empirical approach, Horton also analyzes dominant practices linked to sustainable development - neoliberal reforms, project interventions, and environmental protection. She reveals how these practices support or undermine economic, cultural, and political opportunities for the rural and indigenous poor and impact these communities' advancement of their own visions of sustainability. Finally, the author explores processes of empowerment that enable communities to articulate and put into practice local visions of sustainability, which contribute toward broader social and structural transformations.

Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central America will interest sociologists, anthropologists, and others who study the theory and practice of sustainable development.